This is the 7th mass grave discovered on the grounds of two different hospitals in Gaza. The bodies include those of men, women and children. Many of them were apparently patients.
Tag: Gaza
“Here’s Every Ceasefire Deal and Prisoner Exchange Hamas Has Offered Israel Since October 7th”
A central plank of Israeli/Zionist mythology is the claim that Israel is always desperate for peace but can never find a Palestinian peace partner willing to sign a ceasefire agreement.
That has never been the case, but that doesn’t stop the Israeli propaganda mill — faithfully reported on the Christian Broadcast Network as gospel truth — from repeating these claims.
The following video report rehearses all of the ceasefire proposals that have been agreed to by Hamas but have been rejected by Israel.
Of course, Israel has the right to negotiate as it pleases and reject the proposals it does not like. But it does not have the right to lie about the nature of the negotiations, insisting on Hamas’ intransigence when in fact Israel has always wanted to continue the current attack on Gaza regardless of the peace plan being offered.
“Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic”
The Jewish magazine Forward has published two different letters written by Jewish university students insisting that the anti-genocide demonstrations on their campuses have NOT been antisemitic, but that all impulses towards
violence and antisemitism have been imported by outside instigators.
Here is a brief excerpt of the Foward article titled “Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic“. All emphasis is mine:
Editor’s note: Today we published two open letters from college students regarding the protests that have been roiling campuses nationwide for weeks. Below, 750+ Jewish students from 140+ campuses say they “reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety.” In the other letter, 280+ Jewish students at Columbia University argue that their “concerns have been brushed off and invalidated” when calling out antisemitism on campus. The original letters can be found here and here.
We the undersigned are Jewish students on college campuses in solidarity with student encampments for Gaza. We reject the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic and we call on our institutions to take action to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In the last week, we have watched the movement of student encampments for Gaza spread across the country. We have also watched as these protesters have been met with repression, arrests, violence, and false claims of antisemitism. As Jewish students, we wholeheartedly reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety. We believe that safety for Jewish students can only come when all students are safe, including Palestinian students, BIPOC students, and queer and trans students.
While journalists, students, and even police have consistently reported encampments to be peaceful, school administrations and city officials have intentionally and consistently escalated through state violence. Their tactics have included arresting and brutalizing students, and denying students access to housing, medical care, and religious spaces. The majority of these acts have targeted Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students. This violence we’ve seen this week does not make any of us safer. We wholeheartedly condemn the brutal repression of the encampments.
You can read the entire article here.
Counterpunch: “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza”
Helen Benedict has posted a good story at Counterpunch magazine investigating the student protests launched against the Gaza genocide.
The article is titled “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza.” I include a brief excerpt below:
. . . Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.
Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)
As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.
Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent. . .
You can read the entire article here.
Everything the Corporate Media is Telling Us About Campus Protests is Wrong
Journalist, editorialist and former lawyer, Briahna Joy Gray, explains the motivations and concerns of the campus protests now sweeping the world.
Guess what. The truth about student protesters has nothing to do with the anti-demonstration messaging coming from the corporate media and the political class.
“Words are not violence; Zionism is.”
Check Out My Recent Article in the “Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies”
Today the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies published my article titled “Echoes of Slavery, Racial Segregation and Jim Crow: American Dispensationalism and Christian Zionist Bible-Reading.”
Below is the abstract, that is a brief summary of the article:
The apologetics of pro-slavery, pro-segregation Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identical to the methods of biblical interpretation used by Dispensationalist Christian Zionists today. The ideology’s specific rules of ‘literal interpretation’ and ‘antecedent theology’ led both groups to similar conclusions about slavery and racial segregation, on the one hand, and Jewish privilege and Palestinian displacement, on the other. Abolitionist efforts to promote a Christ–like hermeneutic rooted in Christian morality points the way forward to correcting modern theologies, such as Dispensationalist Christian Zionism, that continue to sanction human oppression.
I believe that clicking the highlighted title above will allow access to the article online. However, if this does not work for you, let me know and I can send you a copy.
Yes, I too am disappointed by the numerous formating and editorial errors in my article. Yuck! Unfortunately, it is too late for me to do anything about it now…sigh…
Former Israeli Soldier Admits: You Can’t be a Moral Occupier
Breaking the Silence is an Israeli organization made up of former soldiers. They share similar stories. The majority did their tour of duty in the Occupied Territory (the West Bank). Upon reflecting on their behavior when they wore the uniform; after thinking about the ways they treated Palestinians, all develop a guilty conscience. In order to ‘atone’ for their sins, and to educate the Israeli public about the evils of occupation, they tell their stories
Below is one recent example dealing with Gaza:
Israeli Holocaust Scholar Discusses Gaza, Student Protests and Antisemitism
Professor Omer Bartov is a long-time Israeli scholar of genocide and
Holocaust studies. One of his recent books is titled Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, where he compares the Nazi holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (the violent Israeli displacement of750,000 Palestinians in 1948).
Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now. They talked about Gaza, student protests and antisemitism:
More Than 700 Bodies Discovered in Two Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals
One mass gravesite is near Al Shifa hospital. The other is near Nasser hospital. Both hospitals have been demolished by Israeli forces.
Many of the corpses have their hands tied together.
Many are women. Some are children.
Others are wearing hospital gowns. Some even have the IV drip tubes still attached to their arms.
I have posted a selection of video reports below. Since most are age restricted I have enclosed the URL in quotation marks. Simply copy the URL to your web browser in order to watch:
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhsRRGvl1dc”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clg-x1dchv8”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcZ4_dZ8WZU”
Chris Hedges’ Sermon for Gaza
The current student anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are if historic significance.
Despite the establishment media’s scurilous attempts to vilify these college students and their supportive professors as churlish antisemites, the abundance of video clips avalable on youtube, X, tic tok, facebook and elsewhere reveal the truth.
Whatever violence my occur is consistently started by the police.
The rare instances of genuine antisemitism are either the outlier having nothing to do with the demonstration’s organizers and membership, or they are false flag incidents committed by pro-Israel agitators trying to make trouble.
These campus demonstations give me hope, not only for the future of our country, but for the eventual demise of Israel as an apartheid state.
The American journalist, Chris Hedges, understandings all these things and eloquently expressed his support by delivering a sermon yesterday on the grounds of Princeton University.
As a Christian, I wish that I could call Mr. Hedges my brother in Christ. Unfortunately, his disbelief in the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of Jesus prevents me from saying that.
I do not believe, as Hedges does, that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ stands as metaphor for the redemptive power of unjust suffering. I see the cross, as I believe the New Testament does also, as the inevitable climax of a life lived in complete obedience to our Father in heaven. (There is much more to be said about this, but that is for another post.)
Nevertheless, as a fellow human being I can only applaud Chris’ profound understanding of the human condition in this world and the cries for justice that arise from those who suffer.
In fact, Chris Hedges has a better understanding of God’s heart for justice, and the work that our Creator asks his people to perform in the temporal pursuit of this justice here and now than does the typical church-goer — fundamentalist, evangelical, liberal or mainline — in this country.
There is much to learn from Chris’ message. I urge you to read it all, prayerfully with a heart ready to respond.
All truth is God’s truth no matter who says it or where it is said.
Here is an excerpt:
. . . To resist radical evil, as you are doing, is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.
Ruling institutions — the state, the press, the church, the courts, universities — mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. All of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. This was true during the genocide we committed against native Americans, slavery, the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the fight against the apartheid regime of South Africa. The most courageous are purged and turned into pariahs.
The theologian James Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”
Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”
Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what their heart expected.”
This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you will be treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.
You can read the entire sermon here.