Hamza Abu Al-Tarabeesh shares stories from the first two weeks of the Great March of Return in Gaza. Despite the fact Yousef Abu Eida, 26, was shot in the leg last Friday, he was back today using crutches and a metal brace. “I came today despite the pain to send two messages,” he tells Abu Al-Tarabeesh. “The first is that I will not give up the right of my return to my occupied town ‘Ashdod’ and another message to the Israeli sniper that we are not afraid of him.”
“The legacy of our people is on the side of justice,” Emily Mayer of the Jewish anti-occupation group If Not Now, said during a demonstration outside the Reform denomination offices in New York against Israel’s March 30 massacre of Palestinians. Counter-demonstrators from the Jewish Defense League chanted in favor of more massacres.
The ‘NY Times’ just cannot stop trying to downplay and whitewash Israel’s massacre of Gazans.
Palestinian medical sources have reported that an armed Israeli military drone fired a missile at Palestinian protesters near Erez Crossing on Wednesday killing Mojahed Nabil al-Khodary, 23, from Gaza City.
Last Friday’s massacre by Israel of 17 Palestinians in Gaza and the US support for the action makes it plain that it is we must throw all our weight against the unholy alliance that has made possible decades of apartheid and periodic mass murder. We can resist; we can protest; or we can be complicit. There is no such thing as neutrality, Michael Lesher writes.
Mohammed Abu Amr’s last creation on the beach in Gaza was a sand sculpture that said, “I will return.” A day later he was killed along with 16 other Palestinians demonstrating on the 42nd anniversary of Land Day. He had been planning to carve a 100-meter map of Palestine along with a huge key on the beach to coincide with upcoming anniversary of the Nakba, and his friends have completed his mission. “This sandy map was Mohammed’s uncompleted dream,” artist Osama Sbeata tells Mondoweiss.
The silence of Jeffrey Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin over Israel’s indefensible slaughter of Palestinian protesters on March 30, and the outspokenness against the atrocity of Bernie Sanders, David Rothkopf, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Chris Hayes, shows that the center has at last shifted in US discourse. American Jews have had it holding the bag for Israeli massacres.
Over 100 musicians, artists, scholars, union members and activists, as well as 33 social justice organizations, have called on the Philadelphia Orchestra to cancel its planned June tour in Israel. In a March 21 letter, they explained that the orchestra’s trip is part of “the Israeli government’s Brand Israel propaganda strategy,” and called on the orchestra “not to lend your good name to covering up Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.”
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem is calling on soldiers to disobey “patently illegal” shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed protesters in Gaza. The Israeli policy in Gaza has not been the result of one illegal order, but doctrine of collective punishment endorsed by the entire political and military leadership of the county. Thus, refusing orders to attack nonviolent protesters arguably amounts to a mutiny against the state. In Israel, simply following international law is a radical act.
Learning of 18 Palestinians killed over the Passover holiday gutted Robert Herbst. He felt shame. But when he looked around, he could only find a scant few voices also condemning the shooting of the demonstrators at the border with Gaza. The indifference struct him as an act that could be worse than pulling the trigger on one of those sniper guns.