The Cruel Nature of the Israeli Occupation

Annette Braden-Rozier, The Chicago Tribune, Oct 11, 2024.

Jews and Palestinians are suffering, but the dominant narrative is that Israel is the rightful home of the Jews and needs defending against its enemies.

But there is another narrative. The cruel nature of the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank is vividly portrayed in two recently released documentaries — “Israelism” and “Where Olive Trees Weep.” They show in graphic detail how residents of Gaza and the West Bank have lived in constant fear of being stopped and degraded by Israeli soldiers, shot, arbitrarily detained and tortured, raided at night in their homes, cut off from their farmland, and harassed and attacked by Jewish settlers. For decades, Palestinians have not been free to move, speak out or own property.

There are many organizations that work toward peace. IfNotNow is a movement founded by American Jews who want to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality and justice for both Arabs and Jews. Many Jews felt betrayed when they realized that they grew up not ever learning the Palestinian side of Israel’s history. Arabs were viewed as the enemy and as terrorists. Standing Together is another group, made up of Arabs and Jews, that is working toward a future in which Jews and Arabs can live next to each other with equal rights.

The Oct.7 attack on Israel was a horrific event, with painful consequences for both sides. How much worse is it now that Gaza has been turned into a wasteland, hostage families are still waiting for their loved ones and thousands of Israelis have been displaced? And how much worse is it now that Israel is attacking south Lebanon?

The U.S. government is enabling this expanding war. Despite knowing full well that the atrocities committed in Gaza should lead to restrictions in arms shipments, President Joe Biden has kept the weapons pipeline going. No wonder that many Muslims say they won’t vote for Kamala Harris!

Israel should work for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza to finally get the hostages out. Stopping the occupation is the path to peace.

Like these groups working for justice and peace, the Biden government should work with both sides to find a solution to end the bloodshed and achieve permanent peace.

— Annette Braden-Rozier, Evanston

URGENT, FRESH LOOKS AT THE IMPORTANCE OF  HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI  COMMEMORATIONS

by David Borris and Jack Lawlor
August 5, 2024

Within four months after the atomic bomb attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 31 year old war correspondent John Hersey  went to Hiroshima, interviewed survivors, and wrote a series of  stunning articles for The New Yorker we know today as his book, Hiroshima.  The book does not treat this first use of atomic weapons as abstraction, instead, it personalizes the nature of the resulting individual suffering to six survivors caused by the attack in ways left unexplored in the recent movie, Oppenheimer.

For many years, Hiroshima became mandatory summer reading on some high school summer book lists.  I remember reading it in the hot summer sun of a golf caddy yard, moved deeply by the descriptions of severe burns, mysterious persistent radiation sickness, and efforts to rebuild life in the rubble of an irradiated city.  The book moved me to question my complete pro-American bias and inquire about how to protect humanity and the earth.

The commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks are more relevant than ever, because we may not have learned all that we can from them.  President Putin of Russia has been threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, a step which could lead to unforeseeable consequences.  He is already using hypersonic weaponry against Ukraine, another unprecedented escalation.

What can we as citizens do to protect ourselves, our descendants, the earth?  We need to join hands  and make international discussion of this issue much more of a top priority.

I wish we could say there is an arc of progress in efforts to regulate nuclear arms.  But the arc is going in the wrong direction:

1.     For all practical purposes, there are no longer effective arms control treaties in effect between the US and Russia.  They have expired or are expiring.

2.     There are now at least nine countries with nuclear weapons, stockpiling more than 13,000 weapons.

3.     The US budget allocates 22.4 billion, yes billion, annually for nuclear weapons and is in the midst of a massive modernization program encountering large cost overruns.  The land-based Sentinel nuclear missile program, which maintains hidden-in-plain site underground silos in a handful of Plains states, just reported a 37 percent and growing cost overrun.  The US Defense Department just gave the green light for moving forward, nonetheless. 

4.     There have been UN resolutions like the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) pledging member countries to forego first use of nuclear weapons.  This is an admirable effort, but its legal effectiveness is questionable and the nine nations who possess nuclear weapons either haven’t signed or privately feel free to violate the treaty.

5.     US peace and justice groups have been pushing hard for the US to forego first use of nuclear weapons.  Senator Markley of Massachusetts and US Representative Ted Lieu, among others, have been leading the efforts, but the legislative resolutions stall in a toxically divided Congress pre-occupied with elections and culture wars.

6.     The peace and justice groups’ efforts have tried to regulate, for the first time, a US president’s authority to authorize a nuclear attack.  Apart from verifying that the order to launch comes from the President, US protocols do not require discussion or review of the order to attack by any other US official.  This is remarkably dangerous should an autocratic or unstable individual occupy the Oval Office.

What can we do?

We cannot assume the US public is very familiar with much of this, and thus should begin a dialogue that uses plain language to demonstrate the need to avoid future Hiroshimas. We encourage people to:

A.    learn more about the situation, using resources such as Arms Control Today magazine and The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft ;

B.    attend the many webinars on this subject led by experts in the field and offered by organizations like Back From the Brink and The Union of Concerned Scientists and a variety of  US peace and justice groups;

C.    Above all, join with other people in your community through groups such as Chicago Area Peace Action.  You’ll learn a lot from others and they will appreciate your insights and talents.  Seasoned groups know how to work with elected officials and their staff members, elevating the effectiveness of your efforts enormously.

At the conclusion of his excellent book, Hiroshima Nagasaki, author Paul Ham points out the irony of how accelerating weapons technology has exceeded human capacity to control it.  In doing so he cites two of the people involved in the drama behind the recent movie, Oppenheimer.

First, he paraphrases Albert Einstein for the insight that “The splitting of the atom changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”  Then, he turns to an insight from the often taciturn President Truman: “The human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and then maybe the insect age or an atmosphere-less planet will succeed him.”

Let’s ponder this with the curiosity of a young John Hersey and work together to prevent another Hiroshima.

David Borris is the most recent past president of Chicago Area Peace Action. Jack Lawlor works with CAPA’s Foreign Policy Working Group and with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

Mountaintop Removal

by Sean Reynolds, from Eurasia Review, March 28, 2024

In his March 24th opinion piece for the Times, David Brooks agrees with a “broad consensus atop the Democratic Party” (is there room for such breadth on the peak of that lofty mountain?) saying that Israel has the right to defend its apartheid regime by killing, banishing or imprisoning not only Gaza’s entire military but its entire elected government (the West Bank’s elected government, as well, but for a 2007 Israel-assisted coup there reversing the election).

Brooks approves of this “consensus” among top Democratic party officials, but laments that it’s not the whole story, as those leaders, he feels, also believe the ongoing extirpation can and should be conducted more humanely.  How could it be conducted any differently than it is, he asks, when Gaza has tunnels?!?!

Brooks seems earnestly to believe that a military enemy’s retreat underground requires ever more frenzied massacres of civilian populations left on the vacated surface. In his opinion piece Brooks intones the ritual cliché that by burrowing as far as it possibly can from the Gazan population – in the sole direction a hyper-crowded bantustan affords, which is downwards – Gaza’s Hamas-party government has chosen to use the population as “human shields.” To Brooks, the Gazans trembling before an Israeli troop detachment are “in between” those troops and their underground foe in some odd, non-Euclidean geometry where triangles are straight lines. All of this, in short, can’t be flat-out ethnic cleansing for its own sake. Brooks echoes Israel’s claims that each humanitarian institution making Gaza livable had, before its inevitable destruction, a Hamas base directly beneath it, later undetectable amidst the rubble. One wonders, short of tunneling into the next life, how Gaza’s elected defenders could have put themselves at sufficient distance from their families and friends that Israeli and American genocide apologists would stop slaughtering those families, then trusting the quick verbal ritual of “human shields” to wash bloodsoaked hands and souls beige-pink again.

Brooks feels the tunnels are a monstrously wasteful overspend on Hamas’ part – his clichéd assertion that Gaza-under-apartheid has, of all nations, the least (and not the greatest!) need of military spending is of a piece with his “human shields” cliché, depending as both ideas must upon the desirability of Gazans simply, and unfussily, dying.  

But the horror of Gaza’s military and government existing at all depends as well on the media-frenzy myth that has sprung up around October 7th.  Genocidal racists habitually summon up, then effortlessly believe, the most absurd such myths and this is no exception.  Does Palestine, alone among nations, deserve to exist without a military and without a government – that is, stateless, in pure enslavement – due to a special inhuman savagery of this one attack?  Name: Email:
On Oct 7 Hamas engaged in a sortie to kill Israeli soldiers and armed, combatant ex-military (nearly all adults in Israel are ex-military, trained precisely to fight alongside Israel’s troops at such moments) while taking noncombatants hostage to trade for the Gazan civilians Israel already held hostage in four figures, without trial or charge.  Hamas will have taken hundreds more hostage than the reported 250 who reached Gaza alive on Oct 7 – hundreds killed by IDF pilots whose Hellfire missile strikes would leave Gaza littered with melted cars packed full before their destruction, and rows of Israeli houses reduced to ashen rubble – Gazans, hostages and all – clearly not by the guns, grenades and RPGs with which Gaza’s soldiers were equipped but by Israel’s own tank shells and helicopter-fired missiles.  One pilot, invoking the infamous Israeli policy of killing hostages to prevent hostage exchanges, assured Ha’aretz that elimination of hostages was existing policy: “once you detect a hostage situation, this is Hannibal … What we saw here was a mass Hannibal. There were many openings in the fence, thousands of people on many different vehicles with hostages and without.”  Concertgoers at the rave, though caught between two military bases under attack, were roadblocked against escape by an IDF terrified of further Gazan infiltration, and many report that after they had fled their cars, an IDF uncertain of their identities appears, in defense of Israel’s shaken authority, to have begun picking them off from the air.

Many actually unarmed civilians, actually killed by Gaza, will have fallen to the “fog of war”  and many also, as with any military action, to the rage or callousness of individual soldiers, but not enough for their deaths to have been the sortie’s goal.  They will almost certainly have died in fewer numbers than Israel’s own, unanswered, civilian death toll counted over any two successive years of Gazan quiescence and in incommensurably smaller numbers than the civilian lives any modern U.S. intervention reaps within its first 24 hours.   Unlike Israel’s answering genocide, this wasn’t even “terror” – this military action had specific goals from which mass killing of civilians (hence any terror motive) were notably absent: from what Gaza had to accomplish with its action, there wouldn’t have been the time.  Pure fictions about beheadings, tortures, and sexual violence, though amplified by top Democrats including Pres. Biden himself, are unsupported by the identification of even a single victim, and clearly invented to justify the massive terror for which, David Brooks argues, those Dems show insufficient enthusiasm.  

Would the collateral damage in our own wars – not to mention Israel’s – justify the complete dismantling of the U.S.’ military and our elected government, top Dems and all, leaving our population completely defenseless and in an open air prison?  Because unless apartheid containment of certain populations – certain cultures, certain races – is justified, Gaza’s violence was clearly far, far more just  than any U.S. military engagement of the last seventy-five years; and its “collateral damage” comparably less blameful, even if ramped up to the horrific death tolls we – not to mention our Israeli client – customarily inflict.

Decades after the U.S.’ last plausibly ethical war, the genocide scholar Hannah Arendt warned us that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”   In the 2024 election, no broad consensus will exist beneath the Democratic Party to support the genocidal fervor so devoid of mercy at its top. Despite Brooks’ assurance, no consensus likely exists among Dem leaders that their genocide is insufficiently humane: instead they seem to note with alarm that its cruelty has become an electoral liability for them, and an obstacle to fantasies of a restored unipolar dominance over a planet wracked with growing disgust for country and its leadership. Our Bidens and Clintons hope to squeeze through to victory through cosmetic gestures like the toothless demand for Netanyahu to cede his position to an even more bloodthirsty member of his own far-right government, and the Israeli-drafted plan for construction of a Genocide-Islandpier over which still-starving Palestinians can be forced onto exile ships if Egypt continues in refusing to dot the Sinai Desert with their refugee-tent cities. 

If top echelons of the Democratic or Republican parties minded starvation warfare, minded genocide, then our arms shipments to Israel would cease until Israel was one majority-Palestinian state with voting rights for all who had forgone fleeing to Europe or America with their apartheid-requisitioned wealth, and instead remained to share in the region’s poverty and precarity, performing the rightly arduous work of making neighborly amends. While few tools remain with which to denazify U.S. culture – at least, not from within the U.S. – some remain, and one of them consists of inching the Democrats towards basic humanity with not merely the threat, but the accomplished example, of resounding electoral defeats.  Our commitment, not just to ending the genocide in Palestine, but to sustaining and upholding Palestinian democracy and with it, Palestine’s elected government, requires that lesser concerns for our safety and comfort be put aside so that the beginnings of a punishment of genocide – falling sadly short, at first, of Hague tribunals – might take place even here, within the United States.

Sean Reynolds was a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and is currently an activist in the Foreign Policy Working Group of Chicago Area Peace Action.  He can be reached at joveismad@juno.com.

Photo: U.S. Marine and Afghan War veteran Zachary Kern burns his medals and a paper flag at anti-genocide “Cancel the DNC” rally 3/22/24 in Chicago. Photo credit: Behind Enemy Lines

GAZA, HAMAS, OCCUPATION, LET’S ASK MORE QUESTIONS….

by Catherine Buntin, August 2024

Americans have protested the genocide in Gaza for these past 10 months. It has been anguishing to see the daily terror and murder of the Palestinian families and children. It’s a barbaric war.

Reflecting on my participation in the street protests at the Democratic convention last week, and having conversations with people from across the country who care deeply about a peace in the middle east, several themes emerged from these discussions that are shared here.

MANY THINGS ABOUT THIS WAR ARE CLEAR TO EVERYONE.

No one excuses the horrific murders of October 7th.  It is a war crime to kill civilians. But proportionality has been lost, the response is openly intended as genocide.

Hamas is a military force, but it also has provided government services to the Palestinian people in Gaza, much as the militant Black Panthers in Chicago also provided basic needed services to their communities for years (something that went unrecognized). These entities serve as more than one thing for their people. 

The occupation has meant that Palestinians have no control over their economy, over their power sources and water resources.  No control over the food supplies or travel out of their region.  And no opportunity for a defense force, or a military base, thus the tunnels their only way to resist occupation. Moreover, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians that happens daily, long has been met with immunity.

Many freedoms are out of reach for Palestinians.  Home security versus home demolitions, secure streets versus IDF snatching and taking people prisoners at whim. A secure environment for children versus abuse of children on the streets and in their homes.  Israelis hold Prisoners like hostages for years often without charges or on fabricated charges.

KNOWING ALL THIS, WE MUST ASK SOME CRITICAL QUESTIONS OF OURSELVES, if we proclaim to hold the moral high ground as often, we do.

Do Palestinians have the same right to defend themselves as Israel has to defend itself?

Is it natural to resist an oppressor? If so, does that resister deserve to be called a terrorist?

What about the oppressors?  Should they be defined as terrorists?

Is “occupation” a racist system of oppression?  Is one side deserving of freedom and security at the expense of the other?  Or are both peoples born with the inalienable rights of freedom and liberty? 

Bringing the questions home, how can Americans convince their politicians to withhold further support from the oppressor in order to achieve a permanent ceasefire and an end to Israel’s genocidal goals?

Finally, do Palestinian citizens have the right to decide the role Hamas should play in their future government just as Israeli citizens are allowed to decide whether Netanyahu will be their leader for tomorrow?

If we ask these questions with an open mind, will we be better prepared to work for a realistic (or an actual) peace in the Middle East?

Catherine Buntin, Public Health Nurse and Board Member, Chicago Area Peace Action

THE LAST BREATH: A POEM FOR PALESTINE

By Kos Kostmayer, poet, novelist, screenplay writer
October 8, 2024


I don’t know where we are

We are not allowed to see

Lights are made to blind us

We are driven out of sleep – ridden down by beasts – banished out of sight

They say we have no right to live, but still I have to ask: whose prayers abide when we are vaporized?

Who cares for us when laws are cast aside by genocide?

Who walks inside the wind with us when all is stolen, all is lost, all is broken in the mind?

We were never born to disappear and yet we vanish

The West is deaf to our suffering, indifferent to our need, blind to our despair, but I have heard the cries of mothers bleeding orphans in the dark

When infanticide is no longer a sin, we have come to the edge where the end begins

We are pleading in the void

There is fear in every step

Death in every cell

I am running out of breath

I am not allowed to breathe

I don’t know what to do

I pray you hear me when I say that if you find my last remains scattered on the bloody ground

Treat them with respect

Take them home to Khan Yunis

Bury them beside my name.

###
In the last 12 months the U.S.A. has embraced, weaponized and fully funded Israel’s genocide  against the people of Palestine. It has been estimated by Lancet and other reputable organizations that a minimum of 118,000 and possibly more than 200,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been slaughtered to date, and the killing continues unabated. The living are hounded from place to place, then buried under bombs delivered to Israel by the U.S.A. The dead pile up. The war goes on and spreads. Israel continues bombing schools, churches, mosques, temples, refugee camps, apartment buildings, civilian dwellings, tent cities, U.N. shelters, designated safe zones, and all the while disease and famine spread and the hostages that Israel claims to care about continue to die or remain in captivity. In the past few days Israel has bombed four countries – Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – killing mostly civilians, including countless numbers of children. Children are always civilians. Civilians are always innocent.

According to Oxfam, more women and children have been killed in Gaza than in any other conflict in the world over the past two decades. The response of the Biden administration to these ongoing massacres is a mix of unforgivable cruelty, blatant dishonesty and astonishing weakness.  A group of American medical professionals who traveled to Gaza to care for the wounded recently sent a letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, pleading for mercy, and saying, “We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children en masse.” It is difficult to think of the current Israeli government as a legitimate state. It has become a state of mind, a feverish whirlwind of annihilation bent on destruction and bred for death, less a governing body than a lethal and well-funded war machine. In the midst of all this we have to retain some sense of our own humanity. We have to embrace compassion. We have to reject the agents of death and destruction on every side. We have to stand with the innocent, and with the living, not with the killers. We have to be grateful for the fact that the international community has overwhelmingly condemned the U.S. sponsored Israeli violence and  has articulated strong support for Palestinian self-determination. That call has been echoed by a multitude of Jewish organizations and people around the world who have condemned the genocide, demanded an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and overwhelmingly rejected the egregious and dangerous claim that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous. We have to acknowledge that the Palestinian people have a right – codified by international law – to resist subjugation. They also have a right to self-determination and self-defense, but Israel has never allowed the Palestinians to assert those rights in a reasonable, non-violent fashion. We have lost our way, we have betrayed our professed values, and we have abandoned the rules-based international order put into place after World War Two in response to genocide. It is a sad but true fact that there is no end to our shame; no redemption in our lust to kill; no sense in our cruelty; no mercy in our politics; no reason in the madness we have subsidized. We have spread death, destruction, disease and even famine without regard for human life or safety. We have forsaken the righteous cause and made ourselves the willing servitors of evil. We have sided with the mighty against the undefended. We have become the agents of an infinite sorrow.

09.22.19

40th ANNUAL