December 9, 2023
Wisconsin ALL OUT FOR PALESTINE March

Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement

“Wisconsin All Out For Palestine”
Saturday, December 9, 2023, 1 p.m
State Capitol, Madison, WI

Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine (WCJP), representing more than 50 organizations throughout the State, sponsors the “Wisconsin All Out For Palestine” rally and march on Saturday, December 9 at the Capitol. We welcome all to join in voicing our urgent demands. This family-friendly event begins at 1 pm at the Capitol.

Our diversity of speakers demonstrates widespread opposition to US policies toward Palestine and the whole region. Coalition convener Janan Najeeb joins speakers from co-founding organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, and Milwaukee Muslim Women Coalition, as well as representatives from Indigenous, Black, LGBTQ+, Labor, and other BIPOC and workers’ communities Coalition demands:

  • Permanent ceasefire in Gaza
  • Lift the siege of Gaza
  • End all USA aid to Israel
  • End Israeli occupation of Palestine
  • End criminalization of speech in support of Palestine
  • Free all political prisoners in Israeli prisons
  • Reparations and reconstruction for Gaza

The WCJP was formed on Oct 8 in response to Israel’s declaration of war on the Palestinian people in Gaza, where civilian deaths and injuries have reached a level without historic precedent. The UN Secretary-General declared, “Palestinians in Gaza are suffering a humanitarian catastrophe. Almost 1.7 million people have been forced from their homes – but nowhere is safe.”

More

The UN Executive Director on Women, Sima Bahous, estimates 67% of the civilians killed are women and children. She concluded, “Women and girls are paying the biggest price. Two mothers were killed every hour, seven women every two hours.” Thousands of women deliver babies in Gazan hospitals without adequate water, medicines, or energy to power medical equipment. Women undergo dangerous c-sections without anesthesia or antibiotics. No incubators or formula are available for the hundreds of babies who lost their mothers.

Half of all housing units in Gaza are damaged or destroyed by US-supplied planes flown by the Israeli military, with more than a million people internally displaced. President Biden signed off on brutal bombing campaigns, including targeting the remaining Gazan hospitals housing refugees, and injured and ill people. This inhumane destruction inflicted on a civilian population must end.

For seventy-five years, the government of Israel forcibly expanded an apartheid regime, destroying Palestinian homes and villages, stealing Palestinian land, and segregating and fragmenting Palestinian families and communities. Palestinians are killed with impunity, leaving the entire populace in a state of constant fear and insecurity.

This year, under the most racist, far-right government in Israeli history, the theft of Palestinian lands accelerated at a furious pace. Heavily armed Jewish settlers, living in hundreds of illegal settlements on stolen lands, killed countless Palestinians and terrorized communities, while Israeli Occupation Forces protected the aggressors. Israeli forces repeatedly storm the holiest Christian and Muslim sites in Jerusalem. These wanton human rights abuses must stop!

The events of October 7, 2023, did not happen in a vacuum. They were the result of decades of brutal oppression, starvation, surveillance, imposed poverty, mass incarceration, and frequent bombardment. Resistance to oppression is not terrorism. The United Nations affirms the right to self-determination and the right to a people under foreign occupation to resist the occupiers. Palestinians fight for liberation, self-determination, and the right to return to their land. The Palestinian struggle is akin to the Black struggle in apartheid South Africa. The actions of the Israeli government are akin to the US Government’s treatment of the Native American population. Seventy-five years of oppressive occupation must end!

While the Israeli government wages a genocidal war in Gaza under the guidance of the Biden administration and with the support of most Wisconsin Senators and Representatives, we stand in solidarity to demand change. We stand in unity to say “Never again for anyone!” We stand together to demand our federal and state representatives position themselves on the right side of history.

Special interests and lobbies must not displace the just demands of the public. We stand in solidarity with the just struggle of the Palestinian people and in recognition of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed to maintain Israel’s brutal apartheid system. We are a broad representation of Wisconsin people who will not rest until Palestine is free – from the river to the sea!

FREE PALESTINE

Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine
Contact:
Wiscoforpali.org
608-440-9587
wiscoforpali@gmail.com
 

December 8 – 11, 2023
Film Israelism Worldwide Rental

Israelism

Hosted by Tikkun Olam Productions
On-demand
Dec 8, 1:00 AM EST – Dec 11, 1:00 AM EST
$5 for a 24 hour rental
Get Tickets

Now available to rent WORLDWIDE for the first time, for a limited time, only through Sunday, December 10th. After the film, watch Q&As with our film’s directors and main subjects:

    Watch Q&A with Co-Directors Erin Axelman & Sam Eilertsen, along with Rabbi Miriam Grossman and Unsettled podcast producer Ilana Levinson: https://youtu.be/6RMEQYNBytM

    Watch Q&A with main film subject Simone Zimmerman, along with Judaism Unbound podcast host Rabbi Lex Rofeberg: https://youtu.be/owg8iRvjse8

Featured recently in the NYT, The Guardian, and The Forward.

About the film
When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.

Press coverage of Israelism

Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 1h 24m
Released: 2023
Director: Erin Axelman, Sam Eilertsen
Producer: Daniel Chalfen, Nadia Saah
 

Call It Genocide, Pay the Price

Palestine_flag_4.jpegMarchers carry Palestinian flags during a May Day celebration in Kreuzberg, Germany, 2017. (Montecruz Foto, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

Private colleges and employers can, and do, ignore the right to speak freely.

BILL LUEDERS, THE PROGRESSIVE, NOVEMBER 30, 2023

A common misapprehension about the First Amendment is that it protects the right to free speech for U.S. citizens. It doesn’t. 

What the First Amendment actually does is bar the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” But, as scarcely needs to be said, the government is not in charge of everything, and the rules by which it must abide have no power to constrain the censorial impulses of others. Private entities, including private universities, can still deny others the ability to say what is deemed in the passions of the moment to be the wrong thing.

Just ask Rabea Eghbariah. 

The Palestinian human rights attorney at the Haifa-based Adalah legal center and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School had an article he wrote for the prestigious Harvard Law Review spiked in November after it had gone through several edits, been fact-checked, copy edited, and approved for publication. 

This decision was made by a majority vote of the publication’s board after several days of debate and nearly six hours of discussion at an emergency meeting on November 18. Eghbariah received an email from the law review’s president, Apsara Iyer, who claimed: “While this decision may reflect several factors specific to individual editors, it was not based on your identity or viewpoint.”

More

But the publication’s online editor, Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, explained it differently. “The discussion did not involve any substantive or technical aspects of your piece,” he told Eghbariah via email. “Rather, the discussion revolved around concerns about editors who might oppose or be offended by the piece, as well as concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox, or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff, and HLR leadership.”

Eghbariah’s 2,100-word essay, which was subsequently published by The Nation, argued that the state of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s savage October 7 attack fell within “the legal framework” of genocide. “It is much easier,” he writes, “to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.” 

The word “smell” in this last sentence links to an article describing how the stench of dead bodies is currently palpable in Gaza. The piece goes on to say, with links backing up each contention:

“Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in [a] both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this?”


Eghbariah, in his essay, cites a report, issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights early in the Israeli onslaught that would only get much worse, that found “a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” He quotes Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and a genocide studies expert, who calls what’s happening “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” Segal notes that a sizable number of international scholars, a group of seven United Nations Special Rapporteurs, and thirty-six U.N. experts have used the G-word to describe what is happening.

Aslı Bâli, a Yale Law School professor and expert on international and human rights law who reviewed Eghbariah’s essay, told The Intercept it was an “excellent piece of legal scholarship” and “exactly the kind of work that good international legal scholarship should do.”

The Harvard Law Review, having invited Eghbariah’s analysis and accepted it on its merits, should not have shut the door on publication because, on second thought, it might make some people angry. 

None of this ends the need for discussion over what Israel is doing or how to respond to it. None of it means Eghbariah’s essay is perfectly reasoned and beyond dispute. (I, for one, think his assertion that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch “are no longer to be trusted” because of their responses to this crisis is way overblown and void of substantiation.) 

But any fair analysis must conclude that Eghbariah has raised an issue that merits consideration, not suppression. The Harvard Law Review, having invited Eghbariah’s analysis and accepted it on its merits, should not have shut the door on publication because, on second thought, it might make some people angry. 

“This is discrimination,” wrote Eghbariah, in one of his responses to the editors who put the kibosh on his piece, which would have been the first published piece written by a Palestinian scholar in the law review’s history. “Let’s not dance around it. This is outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming.”

He was not the only one who found it so. A group of twenty-five Harvard Law Review editors sounded an alarm about the decision, which they pegged as unprecedented.

“At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote in a statement. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way.”

The “public intimidation and harassment” mentioned in this statement refers to the massive blowback that Harvard received in response to an open letter from pro-Palestinian campus groups holding Israel “entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.” Former Harvard president (and also former U.S. Treasury Secretary) Larry Summers blasted the failure of university leaders to condemn this expression. This prompted Harvard’s current president, Claudine Gay, to condemn Hamas in no uncertain terms while rejecting calls to punish the students, saying the university “embraces a commitment to free expression.”

If only that were so. 


While Eghbariah saw his essay published in The Nation and defended by scholars, others have paid a steep price for being purportedly too harsh in their assessment of Israel’s response to the savage October 7 attack that claimed 1,200 lives—a response that, to date, has resulted in the deaths of some 15,000 Palestians, including 6,150 children and 4,000 women.

Actress Melissa Barrera was booted from the upcoming film Scream 7 for posting statements on Instagram using the terms “genocide and ethnic cleansing” to describe Israel’s actions. “Gaza,” she wrote, “is currently being treated like a concentration camp.”

The film’s production company said in a statement: “We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”

Barrera quickly clarified that she condemns antisemitism and Islamophobia and “hate and prejudice of any kind against any group of people,” to no avail. 

Actress Susan Sarandon, meanwhile, was dropped by the United Talent Agency after a November 17 appearance at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York City, where she said, according to press accounts, “There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.” She also said, at the same rally: “There’s a terrible thing that’s happened where antisemitism has been confused with speaking up against Israel. I am against antisemitism. I am against Islamophobia.”

These decisions to punish speech, however questionable, are being made by private companies engaged in enterprises whose entire purpose is to make money. A university like Harvard, and a publication like the Harvard Law Review, at one time headed by Barack Obama, ought to have a greater fidelity to the defense of speech.

For the same reason that the protections of the First Amendment clearly serve the public interest in allowing a flow of ideas free from government interference, a private university like Harvard should recognize the importance of allowing even unpopular opinions to be heard.

Instead, universities are at the forefront of efforts to crack down on anti-Israel expression. In recent weeks, Columbia University and Brandeis University have both suspended the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, claiming these groups have violated campus policies and posed a safety risk. Palestine Legal, a group that defends the free speech rights of Palestine advocates, reportedly responded to nearly 200 reports of “suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy” in just the first eleven days following the October 7 attack, “many involving harassment and censorship attempts by university administrations and rightwing organizations.”

As the campus free-speech group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has framed the issue: “Private universities are not directly bound by the First Amendment, which limits only government action. However, the vast majority of private universities have traditionally viewed themselves—and sold themselves—as bastions of free thought and expression. Accordingly, private colleges and universities should be held to the standard that they themselves establish. If a private college advertises itself as a place where free speech is esteemed and protected—as most of them do—then it should be held to the same standard as a public institution.”

For the same reason that the protections of the First Amendment clearly serve the public interest in allowing a flow of ideas free from government interference, a private university like Harvard should recognize the importance of allowing even unpopular opinions to be heard. In this instance, it failed miserably.

Bill Lueders, former editor and now editor-at-large of The Progressive, is a writer in Madison, Wisconsin.
READ MORE BY BILL LUEDERS

The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza

The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here.

RABEA EGHBARIAH, THE NATION, NOVEMBER 21, 2023

Harvard Crimson students protests for Palestine during the game as the Harvard Crimson take on the Yale Bulldogs on November 18, 2023 at the Yale Bowl, Class of 1954 Field in New Haven, CT
Harvard students protest for Palestine during the Yale-Harvard football game at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT November 18, 2023. (Williams Paul / Icon Sportswire via AP)

On Saturday, the board of the Harvard Law Review voted not to publish “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” a piece by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. The vote followed what an editor at the law reviewdescribed in an e-mail to Eghbariah as “an unprecedented decision” by the leadership of the Harvard Law Review to prevent the piece’s publication.

Eghbariah told The Nation that the piece, which was intended for the HLR Blog, had been solicited by two of the journal’s online editors. It would have been the first piece written by a Palestinian scholar for the law review. The piece went through several rounds of edits, but before it was set to be published, the president stepped in. “The discussion did not involve any substantive or technical aspects of your piece,” online editor Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, wrote Eghbariah in an e-mail shared with The Nation. “Rather, the discussion revolved around concerns about editors who might oppose or be offended by the piece, as well as concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox, or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff, and HLR leadership.”

More

On Saturday, following several days of debate and a nearly six-hour meeting, the Harvard Law Review’s full editorial body came together to vote on whether to publish the article. Sixty-three percent voted against publication. In an e-mail to Egbariah, HLR President Apsara Iyer wrote, “While this decision may reflect several factors specific to individual editors, it was not based on your identity or viewpoint.”

In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “

When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.”

Today, The Nation is sharing the piece that the Harvard Law Review refused to run.


Genocide is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal academia, especially in the United States, has been chilling. Clearly, it is much easier to dissect the case law rather than navigate the reality of death. It is much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.

Some may claim that the invocation of genocide, especiallyin Gaza, is fraught. But does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy that undergirds Western epistemological approaches, one which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice. If the international community takes its crimes seriously, then the discussion about the unfolding genocide in Gaza is not a matter of mere semantics.

The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of a protected group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirmtheir intentions. There is a forming consensus among leading scholars in the field of genocide studies that “these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent,” as Omer Bartov, an authority in the field, writes. More importantly, genocide is the material reality of Palestinians in Gaza: an entrapped, displaced, starved, water-deprived population of 2.3 million facing massive bombardments and a carnage in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over 11,000 people have already been killed. That is one person out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations Secretary General said that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children,” but a cessation of the carnage—a ceasefire—remains elusive. Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this?

The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a thorough, 44-page, factual and legal analysis, asserting that “there is a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies, calls the situation in Gaza “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” The inaugural chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, notes that “Just the blockade of Gaza—just that—could be genocide under Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, meaning they are creating conditions to destroy a group.” A group of over 800 academics and practitioners, including leading scholars in the fields of international law and genocide studies, warn of “a serious risk of genocide being committed in the Gaza Strip.” A group of seven UN Special Rapporteurs has alerted to the “risk of genocide against the Palestinian people” and reiterated that they “remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.” Thirty-six UN experts now call the situation in Gaza “a genocide in the making.” How many other authorities should I cite? How many hyperlinks are enough?

And yet, leading law schools and legal scholars in the United States still fashion their silence as impartiality and their denial as nuance. Is genocide really the crime of all crimes if it is committed by Western allies against non-Western people?

This is the most important question that Palestine continues to pose to the international legal order. Palestine brings to legal analysis an unmasking force: It unveils and reminds us of the ongoing colonial condition that underpins Western legal institutions. In Palestine, there are two categories: mournable civilians and savage human-animals. Palestine helps us rediscover that these categories remain racialized along colonial lines in the 21st century: the first is reserved for Israelis, the latter for Palestinians. As Isaac Herzog, Israel’s supposed liberal President, asserts: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”

Palestinians simply cannot be innocent. They are innately guilty; potential “terrorists” to be “neutralized” or, at best, “human shields” obliterated as “collateral damage”. There is no number of Palestinian bodies that can move Western governments and institutions to “unequivocally condemn” Israel, let alone act in the present tense. When contrasted with Jewish-Israeli life—the ultimate victims of European genocidal ideologies—Palestinians stand no chance at humanization. Palestinians are rendered the contemporary “savages” of the international legal order, and Palestine becomes the frontier where the West redraws its discourse of civility and strips its domination in the most material way. Palestine is where genocide can be performed as a fight of “the civilized world” against the “enemies of civilization itself.” Indeed, a fight between the “children of light” versus the “children of darkness.”

The genocidal war waged against the people of Gaza since Hamas’s excruciating October 7th attacks against Israelis—attacks which amount to war crimes—has been the deadliest manifestation of Israeli colonial policies against Palestinians in decades. Some have long ago analyzed Israeli policies in Palestine through the lens of genocide. While the term genocide may have its own limitations to describe the Palestinian past, the Palestinian present was clearly preceded by a “politicide”: the extermination of the Palestinian body politic in Palestine, namely, the systematic eradication of the Palestinian ability to maintain an organized political community as a group.

This process of erasure has spanned over a hundred yearsthrough a combination of massacres, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and the fragmentation of the remaining Palestinians into distinctive legal tiers with diverging material interests. Despite the partial success of this politicide—and the continued prevention of a political body that represents all Palestinians—the Palestinian political identity has endured. Across the besieged Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel’s 1948 territories, refugee camps, and diasporic communities, Palestinian nationalism lives.

     

    The Nation Weekly

    Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.

    By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

What do we call this condition? How do we name this collective existence under a system of forced fragmentation and cruel domination? The human rights community has largely adopted a combination of occupation and apartheid to understand the situation in Palestine. Apartheid is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is committed in Palestine. And even though there is a consensus among the human rights community that Israel is perpetrating apartheid, the refusal of Western governments to come to terms with this material reality of Palestinians is revealing.

Once again, Palestine brings a special uncovering force to the discourse. It reveals how otherwise credible institutions, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, are no longer to be trusted. It shows how facts become disputable in a Trumpist fashion by liberals such as President Biden. Palestine allows us to see the line that bifurcates the binaries (e.g. trusted/untrusted) as much as it underscores the collapse of dichotomies (e.g. democrat/republican or fact/claim). It is in this liminal space that Palestine exists and continues to defy the distinction itself. It is the exception that reveals the rule and the subtext that is, in fact, the text: Palestine is the most vivid manifestation of the colonial condition upheld in the 21st century.

What do you call this ongoing colonial condition? Just as the Holocaust introduced the term “Genocide” into the global and legal consciousness, the South African experience brought “Apartheid” into the global and legal lexicon. It is due to the work and sacrifice of far too many lives that genocide and apartheid have globalized, transcending these historical calamities. These terms became legal frameworks, crimes enshrined in international law, with the hope that their recognition will prevent their repetition. But in the process of abstraction, globalization, and readaptation, something was lost. Is it the affinity between the particular experience and the universalized abstraction of the crime that makes Palestine resistant to existing definitions?

Scholars have increasingly turned to settler-colonialism as the lens through which we assess Palestine. Settler-colonialism is a structure of erasure where the settler displaces and replaces the native. And while settler-colonialism, genocide, and apartheid are clearly not mutually exclusive, their ability to capture the material reality of Palestinians remains elusive. South Africa is a particular case of settler-colonialism. So are Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada, Algeria, and more. The framework of settler colonialism is both useful and insufficient. It does not provide meaningful ways to understand the nuance between these different historical processes and does not necessitate a particular outcome. Some settler colonial cases have been incredibly normalized at the expense of a completed genocide. Others have led to radically different end solutions. Palestine both fulfills and defies the settler-colonial condition.

We must consider Palestine through the iterations of Palestinians. If the Holocaust is the paradigmatic case for the crime of genocide and South Africa for that of apartheid, then the crime against the Palestinian people must be called the Nakba.

The term Nakba, meaning “Catastrophe,” is often used to refer to the making of the State of Israel in Palestine, a process that entailed the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and destroying 531 Palestinian villages between 1947 to 1949. But the Nakba has never ceased; it is a structure not an event. Put shortly, the Nakba is ongoing.

In its most abstract form, the Nakba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materializing their right to self-determination. In its most material form, the Nakba is each Palestinian killed or injured, each Palestinian imprisoned or otherwise subjugated, and each Palestinian dispossessed or exiled.

The Nakba is both the material reality and the epistemic framework to understand the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. And these crimes—encapsulated in the framework of Nakba—are the result of the political ideology of Zionism, an ideology that originated in late nineteenth century Europe in response to the notions of nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism.

As Edward Said reminds us, Zionism must be assessed from the standpoint of its victims, not its beneficiaries. Zionism can be simultaneously understood as a national movement for some Jews and a colonial project for Palestinians. The making of Israel in Palestine took the form of consolidating Jewish national life at the expense of shattering a Palestinian one. For those displaced, misplaced, bombed, and dispossessed, Zionism is never a story of Jewish emancipation; it is a story of Palestinian subjugation.

What is distinctive about the Nakba is that it has extended through the turn of the 21st century and evolved into a sophisticated system of domination that has fragmented and reorganized Palestinians into different legal categories, with each category subject to a distinctive type of violence. Fragmentation thus became the legal technology underlying the ongoing Nakba. The Nakba has encompassed both apartheid and genocidal violence in a way that makes it fulfill these legal definitions at various points in time while still evading their particular historical frames.

Palestinians have named and theorized the Nakba even in the face of persecution, erasure, and denial. This work has to continue in the legal domain. Gaza has reminded us that the Nakba is now. There are recurring threats by Israeli politicians and other public figures to commit the crime of the Nakba, again. If Israeli politicians are admitting the Nakba in order to perpetuate it, the time has come for the world to also reckon with the Palestinian experience. The Nakba must globalize for it to end.

We must imagine that one day there will be a recognized crime of committing a Nakba, and a disapprobation of Zionism as an ideology based on racial elimination. The road to get there remains long and challenging, but we do not have the privilege to relinquish any legal tools available to name the crimes against the Palestinian people in the present and attempt to stop them. The denial of the genocide in Gaza is rooted in the denial of the Nakba. And both must end, now.

Rabea Eghbariah

Rabea Eghbariah is a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School.

November 29 – December 5, 2023
#ReadPalestine Week

PUBLISHERS FOR PALESTINE

Join us for an international #ReadPalestine week, starting Wednesday, November 29, on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. During this week, we encourage people around the world to read fiction and poetry by Palestinian and Palestinian diaspora authors, as well as nonfiction about Palestinian history, politics, arts, culture, and life, as well as books about organizing, resistance, and solidarity for a Free Palestine. 

To encourage the spread of #ReadPalestine, signatories of the Publishers of Palestine letter of solidarity have organized a Free Palestine Reading List. Participating publishers will be offering one of their e-book titles for free download from November 29 to December 5; all titles will be available through PUBLISHERS FOR PALESTINE. There are currently more than two dozen books on the list in six languages, including a half-dozen award winners, with more coming in. The free ebooks will be available from November 29-December 5.

We also encourage readers to post on social media about their favorite Palestine books, to quote from their favorite authors, and to make learning more about Palestine an act of solidarity, using the hashtags #ReadPalestine, #LirelaPalestine, #اقرأ_فلسطين, and more. Participating indie bookstores and libraries are invited to join us by creating Read Palestine displays, social media posts, and other forms of creative solidarity.
 

Unite now to stop #GazaGenocide and start dismantling Israeli apartheid!

Let’s make November 29th a global day of action to stop #GazaGenocide

Tomorrow, November 29th, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the #BDS movement is calling for an all day social media storm. Our physical and digital actions can be used together to strengthen our demands:
 
  • Permanent ceasefire and lifting the siege to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
  • Lawful sanctions on Israel, including a #MilitaryEmbargo.
  • Pressure on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.

Click here for prepared messages and images to use for the social media storm.

Millions of you have taken to the streets for the largest protests the world has seen in the last 20 years! We are grateful to each one of you who, through your voices and creative actions, have built up unprecedented grassroots power to end Israel’s genocidal war against 2.3 million Palestinians in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip. 

You have shown meaningful solidarity with Palestinian rights by pressuring governments to take action and hold those responsible and complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza accountable. Across the Global South – from South Africa to Colombia – several states have cut diplomatic ties with Israel or expelled or recalled their ambassadors. Others have referred Israel’s war criminals to the International Criminal Court. 

More

Yet, Western governments are continuing to arm, fund and provide political cover for Israel’s genocide, promoting a new doctrine of unaccountable, unmasked, and extreme violence  against  those  who  challenge  Western  powers  and  their  interests. Theirs is an alliance of the world’s racist, colonial regimes culminating in the mass murder of Palestinians. 

Time has long run out – we need to turn the scales in favour of people’s power now! 

Ending all state, corporate and institutional complicity with Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime is more urgent than ever. Palestinian lives and livelihoods literally depend on it. To this end, and as time has shown, BDS is the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. 

Under the banner, Unite now to stop #GazaGenocide and start dismantling apartheid!, the Palestinian-led global BDS movement calls for a Global Day of Action on November 29th, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, to end business-as-usual with apartheid Israel. We call for escalating worldwide peaceful mobilizations and expressions of meaningful solidarity to stop the genocide including:

  1. Whenever feasible, organizing peaceful disruptions, sit-ins, occupations, etc. targeting  policymakers, as well as the corporate enablers of genocide and apartheid (arms manufacturers, investment firms), and institutions (media, universities, cultural spaces, etc.).

  2. Disrupting the transport of weapons, or weapon parts, to Israel, including in transit states, by supporting trade unions refusing to handle such shipments, as has been done in Belgium, US, and the Spanish State, and as expressed by trade unions in India, Turkey, Italy and Greece. 

  3. Pressuring parliaments and governments to cancel existing military contracts and agreements with Israel, as Colombia’s president publicly espoused, and as demanded by the BDS movement in Brazil, a demand supported by civil society and more than 60 parliamentarians in the country

  4. Intensifying all strategic economic boycott and divestment campaigns against complicit corporations, and escalating campaigns to cut all ties to apartheid Israel and its complicit academic and cultural institutions as well as sports teams.

  5. Mobilizing your community, trade union, association, church, social network, student government/union, city council, cultural center, or other organization to declare itself an Apartheid Free Zone (AFZ) on November 29th, if it hasn’t already, and organize a solidarity event or action on November 29th.

  6. Pressuring your elected officials, where relevant, through direct communication or collective direct action, to demand real pressure on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently prosecute Netanyahu and all other Israeli officials responsible for genocide, apartheid, and war crimes.

December 2, 2022
Israel/Palestine on WORT

A Public Affair
89.9 FM at 12:00 pm
Listen Live

Esty Dinur on A Public Affair this Friday has guests Iman Abid of US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Haggai Matar of +972 Magazine.

Iman Abid is the Director of Advocacy and Organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). Prior to joining USCPR, Iman was the Regional Director at the American Civil Liberties Union of New York (ACLU of NY) for six years.

Haggai Matar is an award-winning Israeli journalist and political activist, and serves as executive director of the nonprofit that publishes +972 Magazine.

A Public Affair is WORT’s daily hour long call-in talk program. It aims to engage listeners in a conversation on social, cultural, and political issues of importance. The guests range from local activists and scholars to notable national and international figures.

Join The Conversation! Listeners may call (608) 256-2001, extension 9 and ask questions of the guests. You can join us on Facebook and Twitter as well!

Jewish Webinar Series on Israel-Palestine

The Shaarei Shamayim synagogue in Madison, along with other Reconstructionist synagogues around the country, is hosting this series about Israel/Palestine:

After a month-long break for the Jewish holidays, we return to our series Expanding Our Conversation on Israel-Palestine with a renewed commitment to engage in a deep and respectful conversation as we learn from our speakers and from one another.

Join us this Tuesday, October 18 at 7:00 p.m. CT. Nadia Saah will present “The Nakba: Palestinian History Through Testimonies and Images.”

“The Nakba: Palestinian History Through Testimonies and Images” The Nakba (Catastrophe) began in 1948 when Israeli troops forcibly expelled over 700,000 Palestinians and destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages. Saah argues that a sustainable future in Palestine/Israel can only emerge in the presence of justice. A first step toward that future is facing the realities of the Nakba and its impact on Palestinian lives. She will review evidence using eyewitness accounts, images, and testimony of the descendants of Palestinians who were forced into exile. She will also discuss the ongoing Nakba that Palestinians endure.

Bio of Nadia Saah Nadia Saah founded and directs Project48, a cross-platform initiative to advance awareness of the Palestinian Nakba.  She has served as campaign director and strategist for media companies, rights organizations, and foundations. She also produces and consults on Palestine-themed film and television projects and on campaigns that seek a just, sustainable future in Palestine/Israel. She was Deputy Director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), and she currently serves on the boards of Jewish Currents, UNRWA USA, and the Adalah Justice Project.

Please consider making a donation to advance these conversations and the future of this project.

This series is organized independently and co-sponsored by several Reconstructionist congregations – Congregation Shaarei Shamayim, Havurah Shalom Israel/Palestine Committee, Kadima Reconstructionist Community, Kol Tzedek, Mishkan Shalom, and Or Haneshamah.

L’shalom,Joel, Diana, Marcy, Sue, Rebecca, Brian, and Laurie

P.S. We are pleased that many of you heard the extraordinary presentation in September by Professor Rashid Khalidi, the first speaker in our series. If you were unable to attend, we encourage you to watch the recording:

Please join us for future talks in our series; read presentation descriptions and bios here.

Our programs begin at 8:00 p.m. EST, 7:00 p.m. CST, and 5:00 p.m. PST. On November 1, we will open the room half an hour early for an optional screening of the short film “The Present.”

  • November 1:  Yafa Jarrar, “The West Bank: Life under Apartheid”
  • November 15:  Basma Fahoum, “Palestinian Citizens of Israel”
  • November 29:  Jehad Abusalim, “Light in Gaza: Reflections on Gaza’s Past, Present, and Future”
  • December 13:  Sa’ed Atshan, “Jerusalem: The Politics of Coexistence”

Nora Feder-Johnson
Interim Events and Membership Coordinator
www.shamayim.org

January 21, 2022
Just World podcast “The World From Palestine”!

Dear Friends–

Happy Martin Luther King Day! I hope it finds you well.

This week, on Friday, Just World Ed will be launching our new podcast series, “The World From Palestine”. In each episode of this ten-week series the Palestinian scholar Yousef Aljamal and I will explore different aspects of the intersection between Palestine’s liberation struggle and other anti-imperialist struggles — throughout history, and until today.

The new podcast series will be available globally on Just World Podcasts and will also be available for streaming or download on Apple, Spotify, and all other major audio-streaming platforms.

I am particularly excited to work on this podcast with Yousef, given his wide experience of settler colonialisms in many parts of the world including Hawai’i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Ireland, Algeria, in Palestine (of course!)… and here on Turtle Island.

In 2014 and 2019, he undertook speaking tours of the United States, speaking to super audiences and connecting with Palestinian-rights leaders and activists nationwide. In 2019, he also held good meetings with key members of the U.S. Congress and numerous congressional staffers.

Learn a little more about our new podcast project below…

In the meantime, I also want to tell you about another cutting-edge project that Code Pink is organizing and that Just World Ed is co-sponsoring. This is a webinar, “A Closer Look at China in Africa”, that will be held tomorrow, Tuesday, at 1pm ET.

It will feature two intriguing speakers:

  • Mikaela “Mika” Nhondo Erskog,an educator and researcher working at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a member of the organizing committee at No Cold War, and a member of the media and research collective Dongsheng News.
  • Kambale Musavuli, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is a human rights advocate, the Student Coordinator and National Spokesperson for the Friends of the Congo, and an analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo/Kinshasa.

Register for this webinar that we’re co-sponsoring here.

Give to Just World Ed now!

So now, back to our podcast series… I want to tell you that I’ve really found that my decades-long, in-depth study of the Palestine Question has given me powerful tools for the exploration I’ve been engaged in over the past year, into how it was that a handful of tiny countries perched on the Atlantic coast of Europe came, over the centuries, to exercise a dominant role over the entirety of humankind.

In a sense, the Western settler-colonial project in Palestine– which is ongoing, as we speak– can serve as a microcosm for that whole earlier period of Western empire building.

By having our public conversations on “The World From Palestine” podcast, Yousef and I hope to cast useful new light both on the Palestinian struggle and on the history of settler colonialism itself… And of course, we hope to strengthen the ties of solidarity between Palestinians and anti-imperialist strugglers all around the world!

I’ll let you know the moment the first episode gets released, this Friday!

You might also be interested to see what I’ve been writing thus far this month? In my ongoing “Project 500 Years”, I’ve been exploring the role that successive generations of Quakers played in initiating and pushing forward the English settler-colonial project here in Turtle Island. (The top four articles there all deal with that topic. You can also read them here.)

Did you know that there were Quakers in the Chesapeake a quarter century before the English monarch “gave” William Penn a huge chunk of land along the Delaware River? Read all about that here.

(The map at the right shows who was living along the Delaware before Penn took over and started putting “White” settlers there in their place…)

So now, we are moving into an era in which– I hope!– there will be considerably more equality between all the world’s peoples

Over the next ten weeks, Yousef Aljamal and I will be exploring some aspects of the quest to make this happen. Please support Just World Educational in our podcast project and the other projects we’ll be undertaking this year. If you’re able to make a donation to support our work, that would be great.

Here’s to building a much more equitable, safer, and better world, going forward!

My warmest good wishes–

Helena.

Give to Just World Ed now!

Palestinian Journeys

Palestinian Journeys is an online portal into the multiple facets of the Palestinian experience, filled with fact-based historical accounts, biographies, events, and undiscovered stories. Together, they seek to craft an ever-growing comprehensive narrative which highlights the active role of the Palestinian people in crafting their own history. Presently absent from the global Palestinian narrative are stories of resistance, persistence, and hope, which Palestinian Journeys strives to bring forward.

Palestinian Journeys is a project of the Palestinian Museum, in collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies and Visualizing Palestine. Beyond that, Palestinian Journeys strives to tell a comprehensive Palestinian narrative through a growing pool of collaborations and partnerships with kindred projects, institutions, and groups which produce knowledge on Palestine and the Palestinians.

The online platform is currently divided into two parts: the “Timeline,” and the “Stories.” The Timeline content is an original creation of the Institute for Palestine Studies, while the Stories are original creations of the Palestinian Museum.

The Timeline is an ever-growing encyclopedic collection of historical events, biographies, themed chronologies, highlights of historical, socio-economic and cultural themes, historical documents, and multimedia. It serves as an indispensable scholarly reference for the breadth of Palestinian history.

The Stories shed light on hitherto neglected experiences of the Palestinian people. They capture marginalized and forgotten narratives, weaving together the rigorously historical and the intensely personal in a compelling storytelling style.

As a user, we’re taking you through layers of experience as you surf from one part of the platform to the other, or dive deeply into its content. The journey can be heavily visual or primarily textual, inspiring you to explore that which you know, and that which you never knew existed.

The platform will continue to be populated with valuable content. If you don’t find the content you’re looking for do visit the platform again or contact us.

Enjoy the journey!