Everywhere, COVID-19 has revealed the disproportionate effect of the disease on communities that are already disenfranchised by state-sanctioned violence, including the incarcerated. April 17, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, brings new urgency to calls to free all prisoners in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Jews and allies for Rashida in Detroit are tired of profits, greed, and unchecked power being put before people. Last night was a demonstration of the strength of our community and an invitation to join us in the fight ahead.” said JVP Action Organizer Reuben Telushkin after the event, “The challenges faced by Palestinians are all too familiar to many Detroiters, who also contend with severe economic and racial injustice — and the horrifying ways those inequalities accelerate infection right now.”
A New York Times report on Mossad, the Israeli spy service, that could have been written by the agency’s own publicity department. Ronen Bergman’s article, featured prominently on page 6 of the print edition, contends that Mossad has been indispensable in Israel’s fight against the coronavirus, that it has been “one of the country’s most valuable assets in acquiring medical equipment and manufacturing technology abroad.”
As a deadline looms in Israeli election tonight, Netanyahu has broken Benny Gantz and may be playing for a fourth election, as the coronvirus PM. Gantz and Netanyahu appeared to be very close to a unity government agreement in Israel, between Likud and the now-reduced Blue White. But then Netanyahu wanted to renegotiate terms, and Blue White broke off.
Dr Reem Khamis-Dakwar reflects as a Palestinian from Israel currently living in the United States, that it is startling to realize the many commonalities between our two systems of oppression: limited access to health care for marginalized communities, the stereotyping of people of color as disease-spreaders, and the increased impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these populations.
The corona crisis in Israel has revealed the state’s reliance on secret police, often making errors in identification, and the denial of lifesaving equipment to Palestinians. Here are some heart-breaking examples of what Apartheid looks like at the time of Corona.
A ruling shutting down the densely populated city of Bnei Brak is similar to countless rulings that Israeli High Court judges have written in recent decades on the rights of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories. This time the Ministry of Health took the role of the military commander in a Palestinian village. The ease with which judges have allowed the government to place a closure on Bnei Brak only proves how weak the Israeli High Court of Justice really is.
The New York Times editorializes against the inhumane sanctions program against Iran during the coronavirus pandemic, but in all its reports it leaves out the chief proponent of this policy, Israel advocates, including the disingenuously-titled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Human rights groups sent an urgent letter to Israeli authorities yesterday demanding an immediate halt to Israel’s aerial herbicide spraying in the eastern Gaza Strip as Palestinians in Gaza desperately fight to keep coronavirus at bay and prevent its outbreak into the wider population.
Ian Wellens asks Labour’s new leader, who has said, “I support Zionism without qualification,” if there is a place for opposition to a discriminatory state in the Labour Party. “My politics is rooted in values, and chief among these are an opposition to all forms of racism and discrimination, and an insistence on equal rights which I am not prepared to compromise…However, my party now has a leader who has pledged his unqualified support to a country and a system which is utterly at odds with those same values…. Unless and until Israel re-constitutes itself into a single state with equal rights for all its inhabitants, it should not get any support from the Labour Party.”