The Main Obstacle to Peace in Gaza? The United States

Displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip carry their belongings as they leave following an evacuation order by the Israeli army on May 6, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement.

(Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue.

Edward Hunt, Common Dreams, May 08, 2024

Violent crackdowns on student protesters across the United States have brought to light an uncomfortable truth that goes unacknowledged by universities, the White House, and the mass media: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

As Israel has directed an unrelenting military assault against Gaza, the United States has enabled it every step of the way. Among its most significant moves, the United States has provided Israel with offensive weapons, opposed a permanent ceasefire, and cracked down on student protesters.

“What we are doing today is very bad policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on April 23. “We are aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people.”

Since October 2023, Israel has been directing a military siege of Gaza. Israel began its operations in response to a terrorist attack on October 7, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 people, and took 250 people hostage. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is still holding an estimated 100 people hostage.

Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

Although Israeli officials have insisted that their goal is to destroy Hamas, their military campaign has devastated Gaza. The Israeli siege has killed more than 34,000 people and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million people. There is now “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, according to the head of the World Food Program. The World Court is investigating whether Israel has committed genocide.

Over the course of Israel’s military offensive, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic and military support. Although President Joe Biden has criticized Israel’s military campaign as “over the top” and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “major obstacle to peace,” both the White House and Congress have worked together to help Israel continue its siege.

“This is not an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders said. “This is an Israeli-American war. Most of the bombs and most of the military equipment the Israeli government is using in Gaza is provided by the United States and subsidized by American taxpayers.”

Arming Israel

The primary way in which the United States has intervened in Gaza is by arming Israel, just as Senator Sanders noted. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

This past April, a large majority of elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican Parties voted to send more weapons to Israel. On April 20, the House of Representatives approved a bill to provide more arms to Israel by a vote of 366 to 58. On April 23, the Senate granted its approval as part of a broader package with a vote of 79 to 18.

“It’s a good day for world peace, for real,” President Biden said, shortly after signing the legislation into law.

Regardless of the president’s efforts to frame the legislation as a victory for world peace, several U.S. officials expressed dismay. Nearly 20 representatives issued a joint statement in which they warned that the approval of additional military assistance to Israel made the United States complicit in the destruction of Gaza.

“Are we going to participate in that carnage or not?” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asked. “I choose not to.”

When Senator Sanders spoke against the additional military assistance, he argued that the United States was violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from providing military assistance to countries that are blocking the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance, just as Israel has been doing in Gaza.

“It’s illegal to continue current military aid to Israel,” Sanders said.

Regardless, only a minority of officials in Washington cared about the legality of sending additional arms to Israel. Their priority has been to ensure that Israel can continue its siege, just as several U.S. officials have acknowledged.

“If you don’t help Israel replenish their conventional weapons, there will be a day when Israel, if they have to, will play the nuclear card,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned.

Opposing a Permanent Ceasefire

Another way in which the United States has empowered Israel is by preventing a permanent ceasefire. At the United Nations, the United States has repeatedly thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s military offensive to an end.

When the UN Security Council crafted a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in December 2023, the United States vetoed the resolution. After the Security Council moved forward with another attempt in February 2024, the United States vetoed that resolution as well.

In March 2024, the United States allowed the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution, as it abstained from voting, but U.S. officials made no effort to follow up on the resolution or enforce it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, falsely claimed that the resolution was “nonbinding,” meaning that countries were not required to follow it.

Growing international pressure has had some effect, however. The same month that the Security Council passed its ceasefire resolution, the Biden administration began claiming that it wanted to see a ceasefire in Gaza. Administration officials took the position that a ceasefire would be beneficial to Gaza and Israel by halting the fighting and creating the conditions for the release of hostages.

The actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue.

As administration officials changed their public diplomacy, however, they framed their demands in ways that made it difficult to achieve a ceasefire. For starters, the White House refused to call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead, administration officials said that they favored a temporary ceasefire that would enable Israel to continue its military operations at a later date.

At the same time, the White House portrayed Hamas as the main obstacle to a ceasefire, even after Hamas indicated that it would accept a permanent ceasefire and Israel insisted that it would continue with its military offensive, “with or without a deal,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it.

Indeed, the main priority of the Biden administration has been to enable Israel to continue its siege of Gaza, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged earlier this year.

“Israel has made good progress in doing to Hamas what needs to be done so that it can’t do October 7 again,” Blinken said. “That’s what Israel should be focused on. That’s what we are focused on.”

Cracking Down on Protesters

More recently, forces within the United States have made another major move in opposition to peace. Across the United States, police have been cracking down on student protesters who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel.

Elected officials in Washington have been behind the crackdowns. Not only have they worked to destroy the careers of university leaders by calling on them to testify before Congress, but they have pressured university leaders to call in police forces to arrest students and eliminate their encampments.

“Administrators must take charge of their institutions,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded on April 30. “Clear the encampments.”

So far, police forces have dismantled several encampments and arrested or detained more than 2,500 people.

As legislators have pushed for the crackdowns, many of them have justified their demands by portraying student protesters as anti-Semitic. Essentially, they have weaponized anti-Semitism, meaning that they have accused the protesters of being racists for the purposes of silencing them, destroying their reputations, and undermining the broader antiwar movement.

Amid the crackdowns, legislators have increased the pressure on universities. On April 30, House Republicans announced that they are starting to investigate whether universities that have experienced student protests should continue to receive federal funding.

“The Congress has two really important responsibilities that will be fulfilled in this exercise,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) explained. “One is oversight,” and the other is “the use of the power of the purse.”

A day after House Republicans threatened to defund universities, the House of Representatives passed a bill to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that it would include criticism of Israel. Although its fate is uncertain in the Senate, the bill puts tremendous pressure on universities to silence members of their communities who are continuing to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Still, a small but not insignificant number of legislators have come to the defense of student protesters. The country’s most progressive lawmakers have consistently supported the protesters, even visiting their encampments and providing messages of support.

After police violently cleared an encampment at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a statement in which she praised the students for “raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza.”

Following similar crackdowns at other colleges, Senator Sanders delivered a speech from the Senate floor in which he defended the students. Putting their actions into context, the senator linked the protesters’ actions to major movements for social justice in U.S. history, including the civil rights movement and the movements against the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

“It is outrageous and it is disgraceful to use that charge of anti-Semitism to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies that Netanyahu’s extremist and racist government is pursuing,” Senator Sanders said.

Regardless, there is little interest in Washington in taking the protesters seriously, even among officials in the Biden administration who have acknowledged that “the protests in and of themselves are not anti-Semitic.” Facing growing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take action, the White House has denounced the protesters.

On May 2, President Biden gave a speech in which he claimed that the student protesters are spreading chaos, violence, and anti-Semitism. Just as the Republicans have been doing, he weaponized anti-Semitism in an effort to delegitimize the antiwar movement.

“Order must prevail,” the president insisted.

Suppressing the Truth

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023.

What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

“This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.”

Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction.

Biden Gave Netanyahu the Green Light To Capture Rafah Crossing

Axios reports that Biden and Netanyahu discussed the plan on Monday

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, May 7, 2024

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Israel’s plans to capture the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza before the Israeli military launched the operation, Axios reported on Tuesday.

The report said that the operation didn’t cross Biden’s “red line,” although it’s unclear if the US has actually set red lines for Israel. US officials have said they’re opposed to a “major operation” in Rafah since it would incur huge civilian casualties. But the capturing of the border crossing will have a devastating impact on civilians since it cut off vital aid deliveries, and it’s unclear when or if they will resume.

A senior Israeli official told Axios that during the call with Netanyahu, Biden didn’t “didn’t pull the hand break on the capture of the Rafah crossing during the call.” Two US officials said Biden didn’t view the current Israeli operations as a “breaking point” in relations.

On Tuesday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the US was not opposed to the operation.

“We’ve been very consistent about our concerns of a major ground operation in Gaza that would put at great risk the refugees that are still there, and nothing’s changed about that,” Kirby said. “The Israelis have told us … that that’s not what this is.”

He said that Israel assured the US that the operation was “of limited scope, scale, and duration, and aimed at cutting off Hamas’ ability to ship arms across the Rafah border.”

Israeli tanks and soldiers took the border crossing as Israeli strikes pounded the city of Rafah, killing at least 23 Palestinians, including five women and six children.

US reiterates “ironclad” support to Israel as Netanyahu launches assault on Rafah

Andre Damon

@Andre__Damon, WSWS, May 7, 2024

Israel launched its long-planned genocidal assault on Rafah on Monday, issuing orders for the population of the city to evacuate and launching an intense bombardment.

More than 1.2 million refugees, over 600,000 of whom are children, are currently sheltering in Rafah, under squalid conditions, without adequate food, water, hygiene or medicine. The majority of the children, in the words of the Euro-Med monitor, are “either injured, ill, and/or malnourished.”

Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike on buildings near the separating wall between Egypt and Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, May 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramez Habboub)

Israel bombed residential homes throughout Gaza Monday, leaving at least 26 people dead—mostly women and children—and dozens more wounded and buried under the rubble. Israeli tanks have approached within 200 meters of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the Associated Press reported.

“The War Cabinet unanimously decided this evening that Israel will continue its operation in Rafah,” the Netanyahu government said in a statement Monday.

The assault on Rafah comes despite the acceptance by Hamas Monday of a proposal for a temporary cessation of hostilities in exchange for the release of hostages. But after spending weeks attempting to blame the Palestinians for the ongoing war, Israeli officials flatly rejected the proposal.

National Security Minister Ben-Gvir replied in a post on X, “Hamas’ exercises and games have only one answer: an immediate order to occupy Rafah!”

In response to the murderous Israeli onslaught, multiple US officials reiterated their unlimited support for Israel. “We have always made clear that we are committed to Israel’s defense,” said State Department spokesman Vedant Patel Monday. “That commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad.”

“Our support for Israel’s security remains ironclad,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “The President pushed very hard … so that we can continue to help Israel with its security needs…”

“Israel has a right and a responsibility to defend itself,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. “And we’re going to continue to provide for their security.”

Absurdly, Kirby denied that an assault on Rafah had begun, declaring, “There hasn’t been an assault or an attack” on the city.

In a cynical exercise in deceptive wordplay, Kirby said, “The president doesn’t want to see operations in Rafah that put at greater risk the more than a million people that are seeking refuge there.”

This statement seeks to suggest that the White House opposes Israel’s assault on the city, despite the announcement by the White House last month, “The two sides agreed on the shared objective to see Hamas defeated in Rafah.”

The Wall Street Journal, speaking for a faction of the US political establishment that openly proclaims its homicidal aims instead of trying to cover them up it with transparent lies, declared, “The battle for Rafah has begun in Gaza, and it’s an essential part of Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas.”

In a blunt assessment of the situation on the ground, the Journal wrote, “Early Monday morning Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah, directing civilians to safety. In the afternoon Israeli tanks advanced. The plan is to evacuate and fight in the city piece by piece, swiftly moving civilians north and west.”

In reality, the evacuation of Rafah is being conducted just as the previous evacuations were, with Israel demanding that civilians move to areas under active bombardment and targeting people as they are fleeing. The evacuation orders included no promise of safe passage or that those displaced will be safe once they arrive.

“Through written leaflets, text messages, and recorded phone calls, the Israeli army has ordered Rafah’s civilian population to move out of the city’s eastern neighborhoods, particularly the area of Al-Shouka as well as Al-Salam, Al-Geneina, and Al-Byouk, toward the area of Al-Mawasi,” wrote the Euro-Med monitor in a statement. “However, Israel provided no explanation as to how the civilian population would be safely transported to Al-Mawasi, which is west of the nearby city of Khan Yunis, or how they would be organized upon their arrival.”

Euro-med noted, “More than 200,000 people may be targeted by the displacement orders, which also affect the Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital, Rafah’s main hospital, as well as the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. It should be noted that humanitarian aid access through these crossings has been stopped since yesterday afternoon.”

To date, Israel has ordered the evacuation of—i.e., ethnically cleansed—more than two-thirds of Gaza.

The Euro-Med monitor warned, “A larger wave of displacement, increased overcrowding, and the elimination of opportunities to obtain basic food and water will result from the impending Israeli ground attack on Rafah, which may be the deadliest point of escalation against Palestinian civilians. The Strip’s health system, which is already nearly destroyed, would likely collapse completely.”

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who is currently living in a refugee camp in Rafah, said in an Instagram posting, “If Rafah is invaded, that means the largest and the only crossing, Rafah Crossing, will be closed. And that means no humanitarian aid trucks are entering, those who are in need for treatment outside Gaza cannot travel, those who are in need to evacuate their families to find any safe places outside Gaza cannot travel, the international humanitarian workers, doctors, activists cannot get inside Gaza.”

In a statement on X, Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joe Kishore wrote,

The development of a movement in the working class against the war of the capitalist class at home has to be connected to a fight against the capitalist war abroad. It is, in reality, one war.

It is by mobilizing the working class on a socialist program, independent of the parties of the ruling class, that the genocide in #Gaza can be stopped as part of a fight against the imperialist-capitalist system as a whole. http://socialism2024.org #socialism2024

Since the start of the genocide nearly seven months ago, 34,622 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza according to health officials, with thousands more buried under the rubble of buildings, meaning that the real death toll is greater than 40,000. At least 254 aid workers, 492 health workers and 141 journalists have been killed by Israeli bombs or bullets.

Israeli Officials Say Flow of US Weapons Is Uninterrupted Despite Report of Ammunition Delay

Axios reported that a US ammunition shipment was put on hold, but US military aid continues to flow

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, May 5, 2024

Israeli officials said on Sunday that the overall flow of US weapons shipments to Israel is “uninterrupted” despite a report from Axios that said the Biden administration put a hold on an ammunition shipment.

The Axios report cited two Israeli officials who said the hold on the ammunition raised “serious concerns” in the Israeli government, but the sources did not give a reason why the US delayed the shipment. CNN later reported that the pause had nothing to do with Israel’s plans to invade Rafah and wouldn’t impact future weapons shipments, meaning it doesn’t reflect a change in US policy.

“The stream of security shipments from the US to Israel is ongoing. While individual shipments might be delayed, the overall flow remains uninterrupted, and we are not aware of any policy suspending it,” an Israeli official told Ynet.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan cited a political source who said Israel “is not aware of any US decision regarding stopping or reducing military support to Israel.” The source added that it was “possible that one shipment or another will be delayed, but the flow continues, and we are not aware of a political decision to stop it.”

When asked about the paused ammunition shipment, a National Security Council spokesperson vowed the US would continue arming Israel. “The United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the October 7 attacks, passed the largest ever supplemental appropriation for emergency assistance to Israel, led an unprecedented coalition to defend Israel against Iranian attacks, and will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Israel can defend itself from the threats it faces,” the spokesperson told CNN.

The delay could be related to new US aid shipments to Ukraine. Back in October, Axios reported that the US diverted artillery shells initially bound for Ukraine to Israel. Something similar could have happened in reverse as President Biden recently signed a bill into law authorizing $61 billion in spending for the proxy war in Ukraine.

Throughout Israel’s campaign in Gaza, US and Israeli officials leaked stories to the press that portrayed the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government as at odds with each other. But Biden has continued to provide full-throated military and political support for Israel’s genocidal war.

𝕆𝕟 𝕂𝕒𝕣𝕝 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕩’𝕤 𝔹𝕚𝕣𝕥𝕙𝕕𝕒𝕪 𝔸𝕟𝕟𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕤𝕒𝕣𝕪

–Nasir Khan

“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

― Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the Prussian province of the Rhine, and died in London on March 14, 1883, at the age of 65. He was the most influential socialist philosopher and revolutionary thinker, whose ideas have deeply influenced the course of human history and human thought.

His writings cover philosophy, history, political economy, anthropology, social criticism, history, theory of revolutionary practice, and he himself participated in revolutionary activities. When he was a student at the university, he was deeply involved in the Young Hegelian movement. The members of this group in their articles and pamphlets criticized Christian culture. Feuerbach’s materialism was opposed to Hegel’s idealism. He reduced Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit’ to human ‘species being’.

Because of Marx’s critical articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, the government closed this paper. He went to Paris in 1843 where he made contacts with French socialist groups and émigré German workers. Here he met Frederick Engels, and the two became friends for the rest of their lives. But his stay there was short. He was expelled from Paris in 1844.

After his expulsion from Paris, Marx, along with Engels, moved to Brussels, where they lived for three years. After an intensive study of history, he formulated the theory of history commonly known as historical materialism.

In his theory of history, Marx accepted Hegel’s idea that the world develops according to dialectical process. But the two had different ideas about what the dialectic process entails. For Hegel, historical developments take place through the mystical entity called Absolute Spirit. Marx rejected the notion of Absolute Spirit, and said what moved society was not the Absolute Spirit, but man’s relation to matter, of which the most important part was played by the mode of production.

In this way, Marx’s materialism becomes closely related to economics. Human labour shaped society, and material conditions determined the superstructures. The part played by labour, not some mystical Absolute Spirit, formed the basis of social life. Marx’s dialectal view of social change is shorn of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. The two stand on different levels, and their philosophies of history differ.

For Marx, man working on nature remakes the world and in doing so he also remakes himself by increasing his powers. Marx wrote in the German Ideology, ‘Men have history because they must produce their life.’

Marx went to Paris in 1848 where the revolution first took place and then to Germany. But the failure of the revolutions forced him to seek refuge in London in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life.

He and his family had to face many economic hardships in London. His friend Engels helped him economically, and he also wrote articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. However, he and his family lived in London, plagued by unending economic woes.

However, the revolutionary thinker devoted much time to the First International and its annual Congresses. The rest of the time, he spent in the British Museum library, collecting material and taking notes and analysing the material for studies of political economy. In 1867, he published the first volume of Capital, in which he discussed the capitalist mode of production. He explained his views on the labour theory of value, conception of surplus value, accumulation of capital and the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in the final part of the book. He had completed the volumes II and II in the 1860s, which Engels published after the death of Marx in 1883.

The profound analysis of capital, Marx undertook in the nineteenth century, is still relevant to our understanding of the global capitalism and the forces that control it. He had shown the tendency of capital under the general law of capitalist accumulation. A few own more wealth, but others have little to live on. A recent Oxfam report says that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who constitute the poorest half of humanity. In the global economy, rich industrialists and producers take advantage of the global workforce that mostly lives in the global South. The abundant cheap labour from the poor countries is used to produce goods that are sold at high prices in the industrialized western countries.

The problem of ending the exploitation of the working-class people was a core issue for Marx, and his theory to end this exploitation can only take place when a more equitable form of society is created that stands opposed to the accumulation of capital by a few and the poverty or meagre existence of the majority. That objective of a just and humane society is not possible under capitalism.

Opposed to Genocide in Gaza, This Is the Conscience of a Nation Speaking Through Your Kids

NYPD officers arrest a student as they evict a building that had been barricaded by pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, in New York City on April 30, 2024.

(Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

Rashid Khalidi, Common Dreams, May 3, 2024

Common Dreams Editor’s Note: This is a transcript of remarks made by Professor Rashid Khalidi just outside the gates of Columbia University on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, just hours after NYPD officers raided Hamilton Hall to remove demonstrators who had occupied the building in protest of Israel’s ongoing military assault on the people of Gaza.

My name is Rashid Khalidi. I am the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. I’ve been teaching here for a total of 22 years.

When I was a student back in the 60s, we were told we were “led by a bunch of outside agitators” by politicians nobody remembers the name of today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism back in 1968 and 1969 and 1970. The Vietnam War stopped because the people opposed it, and the people who led that were students, and the students who led that were here at Columbia and at Berkeley and a few other campuses on this fair Turtle Island.

This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country.

Students have been on the right side of history at Columbia and at other universities ever since the 1960s. We today honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful war. Columbia University honors them. They’re on the Columbia website; you can check it out yourself—1968 is commemorated. And one day what our students did here will be commemorated in the same way.

They are—and they were—on the right side of history, and that will go down in history, that when the change finally came and finally the American people who have already opposed this war—who’ve already opposed this genocide—are able to force their craven politicians to stop it, which we can do.

The United States is part of this war. Every plane bombing Gaza is an American plane: F-16s, F-15s, F-35s. Every Apache helicopter is American. Every bomb dropped is American. Those are our taxes. Those are our representatives. Shame on them and shame on the administration of this university. They will go down in infamy for having done what they did the other night.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vw0NV19qfqc?rel=0Columbia Prof’s Fiery Speech—Students opposed Vietnam War in ’68, fighting against Gaza genocide nowwww.youtube.com

Today, nobody remembers the names of the administrators and the trustees who ordered the police onto the Columbia campus in 1968. They have gone down in ignominy and so will these leaders, President [Minouche] Shafik and the Board of Trustees.

And the students will be remembered one day on a Columbia website as the people who helped change the course of this country, together with the brave students up at CCNY. We should shout out to them—together with the students at NYU, FIT, and all over this country.

What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years: the kettling, the checkpoints, the blockades, the police dragging students out (many of them were injured last night), the lies [about] outside agitators. Wait until the numbers come out from One Police Plaza. They were all students. They were our students. And we are ashamed of our university for instead of continuing the negotiations—that many faculty were happy to be part of—decided to bring in the NYPD.

This administration has brought disgrace on Columbia University. Shame on them. Shame on them.

This is not and was not about safety and comfort, which is what they claimed. Do we feel safer today now that 100 of our students have been processed down at One Police Plaza? Do we feel safer today that faculty and students cannot get onto their own campus? Of course not.

Public opinion is already with us. It’s just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students.

This was a craven capitulation to external pressure. The students didn’t want it. The faculty didn’t want it. Outside forces wanted it: the politicians; the media—which has shamefully failed to report so much of what’s actually happening here and which has exaggerated incidents instead of looking at the whole picture.

I don’t want to talk more about the media. This is not about safety and comfort. This is about a genocide being carried out with American money and with American weapons against a people that has been living under occupation for generation after generation after generation. That’s what it’s really about. That’s what the students were about and that’s what Faculty and Staff for justice in Palestine are about.

What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years.

We are faculty and staff who believe that our students should be safe—all of our students should be safe. But the right to protest, the right to free speech, and academic freedom—which is being infringed as we speak. University protocols, the arrangements that this university made since 1968 to deal with these things, have been swept aside in an arbitrary fashion by this administration in response to external pressure. Shame on this administration.

I repeat one more time: This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country. It’s absolutely essential.

Public opinion is already with us. It’s just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students. Thank you very much.

Biden backs police repression against non-violent anti-genocide protests

Patrick Martin, WSWS, 3 May 2024

On Thursday, US President Joe Biden gave a speech from the Oval Office backing the violent suppression of protests against the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza by police forces throughout the country. “Order must prevail,” Biden said.

President Biden pledges, “order must prevail”. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Without citing a single example, Biden asserted that the mass nationwide peaceful protests by millions of people were violent and antisemitic.

Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law, vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest, threatening people, intimidating people. Instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law.

In fact, the violence that has taken place has been directed against the protesters.

Biden was speaking only hours after a huge force of California state troopers (dispatched by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom) swooped down on the UCLA campus and arrested or dispersed the protesters who were camped there. On Tuesday night, a group of Zionist thugs, armed with clubs and firecrackers, assaulted the encampment when most of the protesters were asleep, while police stood by and gave them free rein.

New York City police carried out similar attacks, arresting nearly 300 students and supporters at Columbia University and City College of New York. There were other mass arrests at Dartmouth, the University of Wisconsin, Portland State University in Oregon and other colleges.

Biden’s reference to the “cancellation of classes and graduations” is particularly rich, given that it is administrators who have cancelled classes and graduations as part of the effort to suppress and shut down protests.

While claiming this police crackdown is intended to make American Jews feel “safe,” it has led to the arrest of hundreds of Jewish people, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

This attack on democratic rights is being conducted through a bipartisan alliance between the Biden administration, Democratic mayors and Republican governors.

The assault on protesters is a dry run for martial law. The police forces, filled with fascists, see it as an opportunity to test out their weaponry.

While on the surface, Biden’s speech might seem like a mere collection of absurd lies of non-sequiturs, it advocated a fundamentally dictatorial political outlook, in which the government has the power to declare any protests as “violent” and brutally suppress them.

“Dissent must never lead to disorder, or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education,” Biden said.

Banning protests under the pretext of safeguarding “public order” and “economic stability” has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes throughout modern history. For this reason, international human rights law has repeatedly emphasized that allowing “disruption” is crucial to the protection of freedom of speech and expression.

Biden’s claim that the protests are “antisemitic” is based on the reactionary falsehood that equates criticism of Israel and opposition to the right-wing political ideology of Zionism with hostility to the Jewish people. This is under conditions where the resemblance between Israeli policies and Nazi policies has become even more harrowing since October 7, as the Zionist regime presses ahead with a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem that combines mass murder and mass expulsions.

In slandering peaceful protests as “violent,” Biden is seeking to protect the real perpetrators of violence: the blood-soaked Netanyahu regime that has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians.

While Biden declares that violence has “no place” on college campuses, his administration has enabled Israel to destroy every single university in Gaza and kill hundreds of Palestinian educators, some, like literature Professor Refaat Alareer, murdered in targeted assassinations.

In a statement on X/Twitter, Joseph Kishore, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Equality Party, wrote:

Saint Biden, the prophet of peace, proclaimed this morning that “it’s against the law when violence occurs.”

Aside from the fact that the violence is *entirely on the side of the police and right-wing thugs* suppressing campus protests, his incoherent 3-minute rant was directed at defending violence on a colossal scale—a genocide that has killed more than 34,000 people.

Such is the hypocrisy of imperialism.

But it was Biden’s remarks at the conclusion of his statements that are perhaps most telling of all.

Asked, “Have the protests forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region?” Biden replied bluntly, “No.”

In other words, no matter what the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the population, the genocidal policies of the administration will continue.

In fact, the police operation itself is preparatory to the offensive in Rafah, which is imminent, an offensive that will dwarf all the previous crimes. 

The Biden administration has embraced the Israeli genocide in Gaza, despite occasional “tut-tuts” by diplomatic charlatans like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, because it has embarked on a program of global war, against Russia in Ukraine, in the Middle East against Iran, and in the Asia-Pacific against China. In the widespread popular outrage over the Gaza slaughter, it sees the embryo of a mass antiwar movement in the working class.

Biden is placing himself in the front ranks of the right-wing, anti-democratic frenzy against support for the Palestinian people and opposition to Israeli genocide. He employs different rhetoric than Donald Trump, who described the police crackdown at Columbia as “a beautiful thing,” but the logic of events is unmistakable. The American ruling elite must carry out a war at home to enforce its global policy of world war and counter-revolution.

The program of imperialism is based on fomenting racism and bigotry of all kinds, including antisemitism, to split and disorient the working class. The struggle against war and genocide requires, on the contrary, the unification of the international working class in a common struggle.

Fighting for this revolutionary unification is the central thrust of the May Day Rally being held tomorrow by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site. We urge all students, youth and working people looking for a political program that can unite the working class in a global struggle for socialism to attend this rally.

𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥’𝐬 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 ‘𝐓𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧’ 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐚𝐟𝐚𝐡, 𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚

The Israeli finance minister wants Netanyahu to end negotiations with Hamas

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, April 30, 2024

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday called for the “total annihilation” of Rafah and other cities in the Gaza Strip.

“There are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ – there’s no place under heaven,” Smotrich said.

Smotrich’s reference to “Amalek” was from a line in Deuteronomy, a book in the Hebrew Bible. Amalek is a nation the ancient Israelites were commanded to destroy, and in the book of Samuel, the Israelites were told to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously compared Gaza to Amalek, which has been cited as evidence of genocidal rhetoric in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember, and we are fighting,” Netanyahu said in October.

The “annihilation” of Rafah would mean the death of over 1 million civilians who are sheltering there. Netanyahu vowed on Tuesday that Israel will invade the city “with or without” a hostage deal with Hamas.

Smotrich said any hostage deal with Hamas would be a “humiliating defeat” for Israel. “Don’t wave a white flag. Don’t let Sinwar humiliate us again and win the war. A government that submits to international pressure and stops the war in the middle will, at that moment, lose its right to exist,” he said.

He also called for the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, saying Israel must “clear out, with God’s help, with one blow, wicked Hezbollah in the north, and really send a message that what will happen to those who harm the Jewish people is the same as those who have tried to harm us in the past – they will be destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. And it will echo for decades to come.”

US Working To Prevent ICC Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu

The US backed the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Putin

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, April 28, 2024

The US and Israel are working together to prevent the International Criminal Court from issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other high-level Israeli officials, Israeli media has reported.

Haaretz reported that the Israeli government is working under the assumption that arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and IDF Chief-of-Staff Herzi Halevi could be issued as soon as this week. The report said that the US is already engaged in an effort to block the warrants.

Walla reported that Netanyahu is “under unusual stress” over the potential warrants and is leading a “nonstop push over the telephone” to prevent them with a focus on contact with the Biden administration.

In a statement on Friday, Netanyahu said an arrest warrant wouldn’t stop Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. “Under my leadership, Israel will never accept any attempt by the International Criminal Court in the Hague to undermine its basic right to defend itself,” he said. “While decisions made by the court in the Hague will not affect Israel’s actions, they will set a dangerous precedent that threatens soldiers and public figures.”

Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the ICC, and the US has a contentious history with the court. In 2002, then-President George W. Bush signed a bill into law that would authorize the use of force to free any US service members or government officials brought to the ICC, which is based in the Hauge.

The controversial law, known as the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, authorizes the US to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the” ICC, and is nicknamed the Hague Invasion Act.

The Trump administration sanctioned ICC officials for their investigation into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. The Biden administration reversed the sanctions but continued to put pressure on the court, which worked since the ICC announced it would “deprioritize” its investigation of US forces in Afghanistan.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration changed its attitude toward the court and backed its arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was issued in 2023. But now that Israel is being targeted, the US will likely resort back to its pressure tactics. Any criminal investigation against Netanyahu also implicates President Biden since he has provided so much support for the Israeli campaign in Gaza.

Israel is also facing pressure from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), another Hague-based court that rules it’s “plausible” Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza, a ruling the US has rejected. The main difference between the two courts is that the ICC prosecutes individuals, while the ICJ deals with disputes between countries.

We need an exodus from Zionism

Naomi Klein, The Guardian, April 24, 2024

This powerful, Jews don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our nameWed 24 Apr 2024

I’ve been thinking about Moses, and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.

The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: what kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?

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But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.

What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.

That false idol is called Zionism.

Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.

From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism equates Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and client states.

From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons.

Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here.

It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.

We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism

It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child.

Including the love we have as a people for text and for education.

Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets – this is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education.

Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call in the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students daring to ask them basic questions, such as: how can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?

The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long.

So tonight we say: it ends here.

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Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature.

Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred – including against us as Jews.

Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.

Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in that chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.

Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even – especially – the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirt.

So look around. This, here, is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost.

We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. Freedom from an ideology that has no plan for peace other than deals with murderous theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world.

We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.

That is the false idol.

And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.

What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.

And to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say: “Let our people go.”

We say: “We have already gone. And your kids? They’re with us now.”

• Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, was published in September
• This is a transcript of a speech delivered at the Emergency Seder in the Streets in New York City