Giving Voice To Those Whom Israel Relentlessly Demonizes

“You wouldn’t last a day if you were in the Gaza Strip,” a young woman in a cap and gown snarled at me several weeks ago. I stood in a long line of activists that newly-minted graduates and their families encountered as they left Harvard Yard. We were holding banners and the names of more than 100 Gazans killed during the creative, unarmed demonstrations in the Great March of Return.

In past years our graduation protest has attracted both muttered hostility and thumbs-up gestures. The anger expressed this year had a more frenzied edge to it, reflecting Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians and determination not to let the outside world see that Gazans are people too.

If only a daily read of Mondoweiss could be mandated as a detoxifying antidote! Through descriptive pieces, live blogs, eyewitness accounts and compelling videos and photos Mondoweiss has humanized and given voice to those whom Israel has relentlessly demonized.

I told the angry young woman this year that I had spent many months in the Gaza Strip during more than a dozen visits over 30 years. I told her I was shown the utmost hospitality despite the appalling conditions in which people were forced to live—and she turned the volume up. “You would be raped and tortured by Hamas. They are all animals!”

What could we achieve if someone like this would read Mondoweiss? You and I have read, thanks to Mondoweiss, the words of Gazans themselves about conditions in the Gaza Strip. We have learned why they are repeatedly risking their lives in the Great March of Return.

For eleven years, Gazans have been locked in an open-air prison, and Mondoweiss has enabled their stories to reach us. Mondoweiss’s timely articles have been especially useful to me in making public presentations about Gaza. I have used the site’s reporting to create materials to distribute at a “die-in” outside the Israeli consulate and at other Gaza solidarity rallies.

Because Mondoweiss strengthens my activism, I am pleased to add my voice to those urging you to contribute and help strengthen Mondoweiss, during this summer campaign to raise $60,000.

Mondoweiss has skewered justification by Israel’s hasbara industry of the gunning down of journalists, medics, and children. When the U.S. mainstream media has reproduced unquestioned the Israeli spin—that its snipers merely react when protests “turn violent” —Mondoweiss has brilliantly taken The New York Times and its counterparts to task. If you’re like me, you have found these analyses both validating and useful in persuading others to think critically.

And I’ve relied on Mondoweiss in meetings with elected officials. A group I was in presented information from Mondoweiss to our U.S. Senators, and within days both Senators signed Bernie Sanders’ call for immediate action against the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

You know as well as I do that Israel’s policy in Gaza is “incremental genocide,” as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé puts it. A massive collective effort is needed if we are to have any hope of ending US complicity in this atrocity.

I donate to Mondoweiss because I know that ever more robust journalism is indispensable for this massive effort.   I know that Mondoweiss can be trusted to deliver original reporting and vital insights. I hope you’ll agree and join me in supporting this essential work.

When change seems remote, we can gain strength and renewed determination from the remarkable stories of the human spirit Mondoweiss brings us. I urge you to use, share and support Mondoweiss. Please give today.

If you and I act to inform the world, twenty-one-year-old medic Razan al-Najjar and so many others slaughtered during the Great March of Return will not have died in vain.