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

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

09.22.19

40th ANNUAL