Archive

October 2021

Browsing
Mondoweiss Podcast Episode 24: Organized labor vs. Project Nimbus

The movement for Palestinian liberation has long engaged with labor struggles around the world, and this moment is no different. Michael Arria talks to organizers in the tech industry working to counter Project Nimbus, a joint Amazon/Google project with the Israeli military.

Then-IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, left, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Navy ceremony on September 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

“The one thing that is common among these six organizations that have just been declared to be terrorist is that they have all been active, especially Al-Haq, in documenting and presenting dossiers to the International Criminal Court in the Hague regarding Israel’s violations of human rights,” and particularly of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in 2014, led by Gantz, that killed more than 2200 Palestinians, the Palestinian-American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, who co-founded Al-Haq said yesterday.

A mural painted on Eyewitness Palestine Delegation 69 in August 2019. The mural was designed by Palestinian artists Chris Gazaleh and Jumana Al-Qawasmi and painted by all delegates.

There is nothing quite like a mind poisoned by the lures of racial supremacy, of unmitigated colonial power. In this way Zionist fragility is far from unique. It is the younger relative of every anti-oppressive reckoning forced upon the privileged members of supremacist projects throughout history.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) during hearing on the Department of Agriculture Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2020 at the Rayburn House Office Building, in Washington, D.C., April 9, 2019. (USDA photo by Preston Keres)

Israel’s declaration of six leading Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as “terrorist” organizations continues to have reverberations in Washington. Rep. Betty McCollum has introduced a resolution calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to condemn Israel’s announcement, and specifically called for the Biden administration to “publicly condemn this authoritarian and antidemocratic act of repression by the Government of Israel against prominent Palestinian civil society organizations.”

Omari Hardy addressing the Palm Beach North Chamber of Commerce in July 2021. (Photo: Facebook)

Omari Hardy, a 31-year-old state representative and former middle school teacher, has been unapologetic in his support for BDS and Palestinian human rights as he attempts to win the Democratic nomination to represent Florida’s 20th district in congress. The race will be yet another fight between the Democratic Party establishment and the progressive base over Palestinian rights.

There’s a lot of news this week. The new Israeli government is pushing forward on settlement expansion despite surprisingly strong lip service against it from the Biden administration. And the unapologetic support for BDS from Omari Hardy, a progressive candidate for Congress in Florida, has caused a Jewish newspaper to smear him as a reincarnation of Hitler– and the Democratic Majority for Israel has leaped in to smear Hardy as an antisemite.