Monday, March 18, 2024

𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐂𝐄𝐅 𝐒𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐇𝐚𝐬 𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟑,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚

The agency says many are suffering from malnutrition and do not ‘even have the energy to cry’

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, March 17, 2024

The UN’s child relief agency said on Sunday that over 13,000 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip and that many more could be dead under the rubble.

“Thousands more have been injured, or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be stuck under rubble,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell, according to Reuters. “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry has said over 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and has consistently stated that around 70% of the casualties are women and children.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin previously said over 25,000 women and children had been killed in Gaza, but the Pentagon walked his comment back, claiming he was talking about all Palestinians killed.

Russel said that she visited a hospital ward where children were suffering from severe malnutrition and said the place was quiet because “the children, the babies … don’t even have the energy to cry.”

Separately, the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, said one in three children under the age of two in Gaza is now acutely malnourished. “Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said. Children have already started to starve to death in Gaza, with dozens of malnutrition deaths already reported.

Despite the horrific situation and Israel’s continued restrictions on aid, the US is still providing unconditional military aid to support the slaughter and starvation campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.

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Western Powers could Stop the Gaza Genocide; instead they Cover it Up with “Humanitarian Aid”


Middle East Monitor 03/18/2024

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By Caroline Lund and Brendan Ciarán Browne | –

 The ongoing genocide in Gaza has starkly exposed Western governments’ unequal and wholly selective application of international law whilst also managing to draw much-needed attention to the dysfunctional role that foreign donors and their development agendas play in the region.

Following Israel’s hitherto unproven allegations, suggesting that members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) played an active role on 7 October, over fifteen Western governments took the draconian decision to cease funding of the organisation’s life-saving programmes in Gaza. Erroneous food package airdrops have subsequently been the order of the day, with Western states dropping aid whilst simultaneously supplying the weaponry to the Israeli state that has been erasing the presence of a starving Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip.

As the US military prepares to build a pier off the shore of Gaza, with the alleged purpose of facilitating aid delivery, the weaponisation of humanitarian intervention has never been laid so bare. This is at the same time as thousands of trucks laden with aid for the people of Gaza, ready to deliver essentials amidst this ongoing man-made catastrophe, remain prohibited from entry by the Israeli authorities. With more than 1.1 million Palestinians facing emergency levels of food insecurity, the situation is growing beyond desperate by the day.

However, it must be remembered that this is not due to Western governments’ inability to act or intervene, but rather is due to an unwillingness to address the root causes of Palestinian suffering and oppression – a tendency that stems from decades-long application of a de-contextualised “business-as-usual” approach to humanitarian intervention. Since the emergence of an oxymoronically named the “peace process” and the decision to pursue a liberal “peace-building” agenda in the 1990s, one that centres Western intervention around the proclaimed goal of achieving a mythical two-state solution, development intervention in the region has been profoundly ineffective, despite high levels of fiscal support.

Democracy Now! Video: “Aid Workers Say Israel Must End Attack on Gaza, Open Aid Routes”

According to the UN, donors have consistently placed Israel’s territorial interests and purported security demands, as well as their own political goals, above the implementation of international law. Development aid in Palestine has, for decades, failed to be applied on an equal footing or on a perceived rights-based platform.

In order to try and achieve tangible “development results” despite the chronic and steadily deepening economic and democratic deficit in Palestine, organisations like the UN have started to apply a so-called “resilience framework”, a process that a number of scholars and practitioners have shown to be deeply flawed.

The recent decision to engage in tokenistic aid drops from the sky, despite the outcry from international humanitarian organisations arguing against their efficacy, is yet further evidence of a deeply problematic Western intervention strategy in Gaza. Many of these aid drops have ended up landing in the sea or, in fact, in parts of Israel, whilst others have failed to deploy their parachutes, killing Palestinian children on impact. This flawed and impotent intervention serves nothing more than a photo-op for the sponsors of this ongoing genocide, further dehumanising Palestinians living in Gaza.

The West’s sponsorship of the genocide in Gaza, in supplying weapons and political cover for Israel’s actions, alongside its engagement in ineffective humanitarian interventions that put Palestinian lives at further risk, is the perfect example of how it has treated the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians ever since the formation of the Israeli state in 1948.

In addition to extending the humanitarian crisis by months, building a “temporary” pier off the coast of Gaza for the purported delivery of aid could, in effect, work to facilitate “voluntary migration” out of the Strip. As both the US and Israel have failed to exert pressure on neighbouring Egypt to open its borders to Palestinians fleeing starvation and indiscriminate bombing, the pier will conveniently create an entry point into Gaza that does not border Israel. It is thus far from cynical to argue that these purported humanitarian interventions are anything other than a stalling tactic designed to allow the US and Israel time needed to achieve their ultimate political aims and objectives – an ethnically cleansed Gaza.

Using aid as a weapon against a besieged population amidst a genocide shames those in the international donor community and reveals their deep complicity in crimes against humanity. Development and humanitarian intervention in Palestine have long been a smokescreen, allowing for the ongoing oppression and dispossession of Palestinians whilst simultaneously presenting a sense of feigned concern to onlookers in the West. Foreign humanitarian intervention in Palestine has been catastrophic, and the time for a fulsome re-evaluation of the root causes of humanitarian need has long since passed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

 

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Unlocking the ‘Mystery’ – Ilan Pappé Writes In Memory of Aaron Bushnell


Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, in protest against Israel’s genocidal war. (Image: Palestine Chronicle, via social media)

By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle, March 14, 2024 

Hopefully, one day, in a liberated Palestine, there will be a street to commemorate these brave young men and women, who taught the world that what is taking place in Palestine is an injustice that cannot be tolerated.

Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice for the sake of Gaza and Palestine became yesterday’s news too quickly.  

Aaron was a cyber defense operation specialist in the US Airforce and he died at the age of 25 from injuries sustained when he set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington.

The official US army and police conveyed their sympathy to the family, but nothing was mentioned about the background and the cause Aaron was willing to die for. 

At best, the incident was described as a ‘tragic event’. The Pentagon explained that Aaron’s protest was against the war in Gaza and ignored his main message, blaming the United States for being complicit in the genocide.

I hope most of us will not be content with the official response. If we are, it means we disrespect the brave outcry of this young man and, in that case, his sacrifice will be in vain.

It was no accident that Aaron Bushnell donned his military uniform and broadcast live his heroic act of sacrifice over the internet.

As “an active duty member”, he wrote, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide”.

‘Free Palestine’

This was his main message before dousing himself in a clear liquid and setting himself on fire, crying “Free Palestine”.

In the pre-action message, he wrote:

 “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine, at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” 

I write this piece with trepidation, making sure it does not sound like encouragement for others to go to that extreme – but find it difficult not to admire Aaron’s bravery acknowledged by the resistance movement in Gaza that praised the American pilot who:

“Immortalized his name as a defender of human values and the plight of the Palestinian people, who are oppressed by the American administration and its unjust policies.”

An Important Message

Aaron’s message is simple and clear: the US is complicit in the first-ever televised genocide in modern times. And if you serve in the American administration or army, then you, too, are complicit.

The physical venue where the complicity is translated into actual collaboration is, indeed, the Israeli embassy in Washington, and this is why Aaron decided to protest there.

Other parts of Aaron’s message need to be repeated and echoed by many of us. 

He asked whether decent people should have been quiet during slavery in America, or during Apartheid in South Africa. Or everywhere in the world throughout history, when people sacrificed their lives in the struggle for justice? 

Aaron was unable to stop the American complicity in the genocide, but he hoped that it would not go unnoticed.

But it is not only the message of Aaron’s self-sacrifice that is so important. His persona was equally crucial.

Everyone who knew him remembered him for “his kindness, gentleness, thoughtfulness”. A friend told reporters that he was “the kindest, gentlest, silliest little kid in the Air Force” and “one of the most principled comrades”.

The day before his self-immolation, he sent a will to his friend, gave his cat to a neighbor and mentioned to his friend that his fridge was full for them to enjoy.

We Need You

It is important to know who Aaron was, as the tendency is to describe young men like him as insane, fanatics or zealots. 

The truth is Aaron was a healthy person who felt so helpless as to be part of an institution that is complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians.

He was a sensitive person who sacrificed his life, hoping this would send a message.

We shall beseech people not to take these extreme measures. We need them on the streets, at the protests.

We need them to quit positions and jobs to demonstrate their humanity in the face of a genocide that is televised to us on an hourly basis, one that is still ongoing.

Aaron was ready to face future challenges in life.

He was actively pursuing a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from the Western Governors University. Also, he had earlier engaged in coursework related to software development at the Southern New Hampshire University and computer science at the University of Maryland Global Campus, according to the information on his LinkedIn profile.

The mainstream media in the US asked how come a young man who loved the Lord of the Rings and karaoke would do something so extreme. They defined it as a mystery.  

The answer for them was not Palestine, but Aaron’s association with the religious group, a cult he belonged to as a child and that allegedly mistreated its members.

The explanation US media provided was that when you leave a tight-knit group, you find it hard to belong elsewhere. Maybe this is true, but still, it does not explain Aaron’s act of self-sacrifice.

He did not do this because he was a lost soul. 

To the contrary, the fact that he had experienced injustice, pushed him – in the words of his close friends –  to try and “defend those who don’t care or can’t defend themselves”. 

This is why he looked for ways of being a social activist for just causes.

Aaron is Not Alone

Mainstream media in the US refuses to accept Aaron’s, and many other young Americans’ perception of the injustice in Palestine as equal to that experienced by slaves in America, or the victims of American imperialism in Vietnam. 

But more and more young Americans realize that the US policy is one of the major reasons for the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians. Many more will be aware of it now.

Aaron was not a superficial observer.

He felt uneasy being in the army and began, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, to research the history of violence inflicted by the US, both domestically – against its own citizens – and across the world, against others. 

His soul-searching led him to consider leaving the army. His dream of a career was strongly associated with a wish to earn enough money to help the just causes he believed in.

It is not only Aaron that we should not forget.

We still do not know the name and identity of the brave woman who set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta last December. Even in that case, a Palestinian flag was found at the scene.

Aaron reminds us of Norman Morrison who did the same in front of the offices of Robert McNamara, the most senior American politician responsible for the devastation of Vietnam in the mid-1960s. 

And there were others in the US, such as Wyne Alan Bruce, who set himself on fire in April 2022 in Washington, on Earth Day, as a form of protest against international inaction in the face of environmental catastrophes, including climate change. 

And beyond the US, we all remember Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in 1963, in protest against the pro-American South Vietnamese persecution of Buddhist monks.

And we also remember Mohamed Bouaziz, the Tunisian food trader who, in his act of sacrifice, triggered what became known as the Arab Spring.

Inquiring a bit deeper, I was surprised to learn that hardly anyone in the US military voiced concern, let alone criticism, about the American involvement in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Therefore, one can understand how lonely Aaron must have felt.

I wish we could all have talked to Aaron and told him that we could have used his expertise for the cause we all believe in. 

But the least we could do now is to remember him. 

And hopefully, one day, in a liberated Palestine, there will be a street to commemorate these brave young men and women, who taught the world that what is taking place in Palestine is an injustice that cannot be tolerated.

– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

President Joe Biden Is Shipping Weapons to Israel Every 36 Hours

 By Stephen Semler, Jacobin, March 13, 2024

 

The Biden administration has been able to maintain a low profile by spreading arms provision to Israel across more than 100 smaller munitions sales — allowing the president to posture as a peacekeeper while US weapons wipe Gaza off the map.

 

President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting in the East Room of the White House on March 12, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

In the one hundred fifty days after October 7, Israel killed thirty-one thousand Palestinians, injured seventy-two thousand, displaced 1.7 million, and razed or damaged more than half of Gaza’s buildings. Joe Biden sent over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel during the same stretch. In a recent classified briefing, US officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than one hundred separate weapons sales to Israel in the one hundred fifty days after October 7, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. That works out to one new arms deal every thirty-six hours, on average.

These transfers are classified as sales, but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense. The vast majority are funded through State Department grants. Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public, and the only reason he did is because he had to. Section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the president to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value. The notification threshold depends on the type of matériel (for “significant military equipment” it’s $14 million; for other military articles and services, $50 million; for military construction services, $200 million), but also the recipient. For NATO countries and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel, the notification thresholds for these three categories are considerably higher ($25 million, $100 million, and $300 million, respectively).

While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret. The quantity of sales since October 7 is case in point. By spreading his military support for Israel across more than one hundred sales, Biden kept pretty much all of them “under threshold” per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny. Biden might have picked up this trick from his predecessor. Donald Trump exploited the same loophole to dodge oversight on arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose intense and indiscriminate bombing of Yemen at the time had created a dire humanitarian crisis.

Keeping these transfers out of public view makes it easier for Biden to cast himself as Humanitarian of the Year in Gaza while going great lengths to help Israel destroy it. Biden’s series of food airdrops suggests he’s bravely trying to fix a catastrophe beyond his control. Administration officials perpetuate this narrative by insisting the president has no leverage over Israel. “There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate to other countries’ sovereign decisions,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller recently said.

This is wrong. The catastrophe in Gaza is the result of a deliberate policy choice Biden made. Israel’s military offensive would not be possible without him fast-tracking such vast quantities of weapons to its arsenal over the last several months. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted that Israel’s assault on Gaza relies on a steady stream (a torrent, in fact) of US weapons, once telling a group of local government officials, “We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions.” From October 7 to mid-February, Biden had delivered twenty-one thousand bombs to Israel, and Israel had already dropped half of them.

Netanyahu structured an urgent plea to US lawmakers in November in a similar way: “I need ammo, ammo, and ammo — yesterday,” he said and specifically requested 155 mm artillery shells. More than thirty aid and advocacy groups had urged the Biden administration not to supply this ammunition because the shells are unguided, highly explosive (with a casualty radius of 100 to 300 meters) and have been used by Israel in the past to hit hospitals, schools, shelters, and safe zones. Biden transferred 57,021 of them to Israel a few weeks later. The Israeli army announced in early December that it had fired more than one hundred thousand shells since its ground invasion of Gaza began on October 27, adding that artillery plays a “central role” by providing “intense fire cover” for its troops.

Israel lacks the production capacity to prosecute one of the deadliest, most intense bombing campaigns in history relying only on its own munitions. Israel’s assault on Gaza continues because Biden thinks it should continue. If he thought otherwise, he would shut down the weapons pipeline he constructed to enable it.

In a recent poll, 52 percent of Americans said the United States should halt weapons transfers to Israel, while only 27 percent said they should continue. Among 2020 Biden voters, the margin was 62 to 14 percent.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

UNRWA staffers tortured by Israeli troops to falsely admit 'Hamas links'

Israel has sought for years to dismantle the UN agency to destroy Palestinian refugees' right of return

News Desk, The Cradle,

MAR 9, 2024

(Photo credit: Reuters)

An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.

The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.

"Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities," the report says.

The report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention, including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.

Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as "coercion" and "pressure" to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.

In addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the report added.

UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to human rights investigators at UN agencies and outside rights groups.

"When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights," she said.

Amid the torture and medical neglect, 27 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war on 7 October.

Israel has accused UNRWA employees of participation in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and military bases. Israel provided no evidence for the claim, but 16 countries, including the US, paused $450 million in UNRWA funding in response, throwing its aid operations into crisis just as starvation was beginning to grip Gaza.

Israel's campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what is now Israel alive.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Biden Aid Port Plan Rebuked as ‘Pathetic’ PR Effort as Israel Starves Gazans

Displaced Palestinians gather to receive food in Rafah

Displaced Palestinian children gather to receive food at a donation point in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 7, 2024.

(Photo: Yasser Qudihe/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

“We need accountability, not more harebrained headline-chasing schemes,” said a campaigner with Medical Aid for Palestinians.

By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, Mar 07, 2024

President Joe Biden is expected to announce during his State of the Union address Thursday night that the U.S. military will construct a temporary port on Gaza’s coastline to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance, a plan that critics said is a far cry from what’s needed to end Israel’s forced starvation of the enclave’s population.

It’s expected to take up to two months for large aid packages to begin flowing through the seaport, which a White House official said would be able to “receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to demand Israel let in aid right now while Palestinian children are literally being starved to death?” asked Josh Ruebner, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University and former policy director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “Waiting 45-60 days to build a temporary pier doesn’t help Palestinians starving to death today.”

“Besides, how are you going to offload the aid from the pier to the land given that Israel shoots at Palestinian boats all the time?” Ruebner continued. “And even if you get the aid to land, how does it get distributed to those most in need? Maybe you should have thought about that before you cut off aid to UNRWA, the only agency able to distribute aid throughout the Gaza Strip.”

The White House said Thursday that in addition to the aid port, it will “continue to work to increase the amount of aid flowing through existing border crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom.” The administration also said the Israeli government, at the request of the U.S., has “prepared a new land crossing directly into northern Gaza,” which Israel has mostly cut off from aid for months—causing children to starve to death.

“All of these efforts in order to avoid what actually matters: Stopping the war,” responded Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Pathetic.”

Biden’s port announcement will come days after the U.S. began airdropping aid into Gaza as Israel continued obstructing ground deliveries and attacking aid convoys. According to the United Nations, 150 aid trucks at most are reaching Gaza daily—half of the bare minimum needed.

“Israel has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said Thursday.

“The aid that his administration is trying to get into Gaza can’t get through Israel’s blockade. Instead of announcing a total arms embargo—or at least until Israel allows aid to get in!—he is building a port.”

Aid that arrives at the temporary U.S. port will be routed through Cyprus and “will undergo prior inspection by Israel,” The Washington Postreported, raising concerns that Israel will impede the maritime shipments just as it has done with ground shipments.

U.S. officials claimed the port operation would not require any American troops on the ground but “did not provide details about how the pier would be built,” The Associated Pressreported. “One noted that the U.S. military has ‘unique capabilities’ and can do things from ‘just offshore.'”

Human rights groups and aid workers have implored the U.S. to exert pressure on the Israeli government—including by cutting off arms sales—to end its suffocating blockade, allow aid to flow freely through land crossings, and support a lasting cease-fire.

“Biden is sending Israel a new shipment of weapons every 36 hours,” said Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of the progressive Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow. “The aid that his administration is trying to get into Gaza can’t get through Israel’s blockade. Instead of announcing a total arms embargo—or at least until Israel allows aid to get in!—he is building a port.”

Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians, wrote on social media that “the infrastructure required to get aid to those who need it in Gaza already exists, the problem is just that Israel keeps attacking and obstructing it.”

“We need accountability, not more harebrained headline-chasing schemes,” Talbot added. “Literally nobody on the ground is advocating for this. They want you to stop providing the bombs doing the damage.”

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Friday, March 08, 2024

No One’s Rights Should Depend on Where Their Ancestors Lived

By Ben Burgis, Jacobin, March 7, 2024

Arguments over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really indigenous” are beside the point. No one’s human rights should depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from.

People who insist that either Palestinians or Israelis are “indigenous” to the land are embracing the logic of reactionaries. (Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Claudia Tenney is a congresswoman from upstate New York. Much of her district (NY-24) was, for centuries before “New York state” came into existence, the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy. A right-wing Republican, Tenney presumably doesn’t think much of land acknowledgments or hand-wringing about the idea that NY-24 sits on “stolen land.”

And yet, Tenney is in the news this week for introducing something called the RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act. She wants to require that US government documents stop referring to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it “Judea and Samaria.” She claims that “the term ‘West Bank’” is “used to delegitimize Israel’s historical claim to this land.”

The idea seems to be that, because ancient Jewish kingdoms were located there thousands of years ago, and Israeli Jews are descendants of the people who lived in those kingdoms, Palestinian rights are irrelevant. It’s a bit like an extremely high-stakes diplomatic land acknowledgment.

Tenney is far from the only one on the Right thinking this way as Israel rains death and destruction on the civilian population of Gaza and pogroms by Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank. At a recent appearance at the Cambridge Union in the UK, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro argued that Israel is “the ultimate case of decolonization in human history after return of a native population to its homeland and battle to throw off the shackles of the British Empire.”

There’s surely an element of trolling in Shapiro’s use of this language. Since when does he care about “decolonization” anywhere else? But he’s deadly serious about his support for the status quo in Israel/Palestine. He recently claimed, for example, that a Palestinian state would be an unacceptable “terrorist entity on Israel’s borders.” And I seriously doubt that Shapiro wants the five million or so Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be granted Israeli citizenship, which would make Israel no longer a specifically “Jewish state” but a multiethnic democracy with roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Palestinian citizens.

So presumably he wants those millions of people to continue to be denied basic rights — to continue to be tried in military courts instead of real courts when they’re accused of crimes, for example, and to continue to be unable to vote their rulers out of office. And the justification for that would have to be the one cited by Congresswoman Tenney: Israel’s “historical claim” to the land.

There’s also a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this position. They’re rightly horrified by the denial of democratic rights to the Palestinians, and especially by the mass starvation and indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, where the Israeli military has displaced at least 85 percent of the population from their homes since October. This anger leads them to indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the country, are “settlers” and “colonizers.” I’ve seen social media posts, for example, where pictures of stereotypically “white”-looking Israeli Jews with European-sounding surnames are used to mock the idea that Israelis are “indigenous to the Middle East.”

The implication happens to be wrong. On at least some estimates, Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors once lived in Northern or Eastern Europe, make up less than a third of Israel’s Jewish population. They’re greatly outnumbered by Israeli Jews whose ancestors lived in various Middle Eastern countries during the same time period and who often had to flee from those countries in the twentieth century. But this kind of rhetoric isn’t just wrong because it’s based on a shaky understanding of the facts. It’s deeply wrong in principle.

The great German socialist thinker August Bebel famously said that antisemitism is “the socialism of fools,” since antisemites tend to scapegoat cabals of “Jewish bankers” for the problems of an entire economic system. To tweak Bebel’s observation a bit, this kind of rhetoric about all Israelis being “settlers” whose presence in their country is illegitimate represents the anti-Zionism of fools. Zionism should be rejected because ethnostates are wrong in principle. No nation-state should be a state “of” a specific ethnic or religious subset of its residents, and the most just solution would be a single secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone.

People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries like Tenney and Shapiro while reversing the implication. The problem with the Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that this is even a relevant question.

The Iroquois Confederacy probably came together somewhere between five hundred and nine hundred years ago, depending on which estimates you believe. The tribes that made it up were already there before that, and presumably before they were there, other groups lived in the same area. Humans have lived there for about ten thousand years. It was wrong to displace the Iroquois, and if their ancestors displaced some earlier group, that was wrong too. Whatever injustices fill the history books, though, everyone except for outright racists and fascists takes it for granted that everyone who lives there now should have equal rights now, regardless of any ethnic group’s “historical claims.” The exact same principle should apply to Israel/Palestine.

Even someone as rabidly right-wing as Tenney would presumably grant that everyone in her district should have democratic rights, regardless of whether their ancestors lived in the Iroquois Confederacy or their great-great-grandparents came to New York from Ireland in the 1800s or they’re first-generation immigrants who take their citizenship test last week. And anyone who can acknowledge that should also recognize that no one in Israel/Palestine should be denied rights based on their ancestors having lived in the wrong place — whether “wrong” ancestry means not being descended from ancient Judeans and Samarians or not having great-great-grandparents who lived in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel.

The problem with Zionism is that it’s obscene for anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live to depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived. Zionism should be rejected not because we think Palestinians have a better claim than Israeli Jews to a blood-and-soil connection to the land, but on the basis of the universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative basis of the socialist movement and, before that, were proclaimed by the French Revolutionaries in 1789.

Those principles say that everyone is entitled to the same package of rights, just for being a human being. Socialists think that package includes the right to have your material needs met and the right to have a say in the economic decisions that touch your life. But even liberals believe in a set of universal rights that are clearly inconsistent with displacing anyone from their homes or denying anyone a democratic say in the political institutions that govern them because they come from the “wrong” ethnic background.

Many actually existing liberals are woefully inconsistent in their application of these principles, especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine. But the principles themselves are correct, and sticking to them is the only way out of interminable and deadly land feuds.

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Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.

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