As the world ushered in 2024 and demonstrators across the world called for a ceasefire, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for more than two million Palestinians to be forcibly displaced from Gaza.
As the Biden administration sets its sites on a confrontation with Ansar Allah in the Red Sea, the U.S. is flirting dangerously with the regional conflagration it has been trying to avoid since October 7.
An Israeli airstrike killed the father of an Al Jazeera correspondent in Jabalia, while Houthi rebels launched a missile on a ship scheduled to dock in Ashdod. In the West Bank, Israeli forces executed a Palestinian boy in Tubas in cold blood.
Palestinians have called for a global strike on Monday as Israel continues to kill Palestinians by the thousands, refusing a ceasefire as analysts warn a miscalculation could trigger a regional war.
Israeli forces besiege Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza. Meanwhile, two Lebanese journalists were killed by Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, and Palestinian prisoners continue to face humiliation, abuse and torture inside Israeli prisons.
Growing up, many Arab diaspora homes in Kenya watched Middle-Eastern satellite TV for connection to our lands. Shireen Abu Akleh helped me understand that we were living, but this wasn’t our home.
“Train stations overflowing with terrified families fleeing their homes; nights sheltering in basements and cellars; mornings sitting through the rubble in your homes — these are not memories of the past,” Biden said of Ukraine. He meant World War II, but such horrors have regularly unfolded in the Middle East at the hands of America or its allies.
You see no universal Western outrage over the US support for the Saudi blockade on Yemen, which has killed an estimated 377,000, most of them children dead of famine. The Western press sometimes does report on Western atrocities, but with nothing approaching the rage it reserves for the crimes of our enemies. If there isn’t a constant drumbeat of stories about our atrocities as there is for Putin’s, and pundits aren’t constantly agonizing over our need to do something, the unspoken message is that our crimes simply aren’t that important or bad. Yes this is an argument for whataboutism– but you must be a moral imbecile to think there is something wrong with it because of that.
Rhode Island activists blockade Raytheon weapons facility to protest arm sales to Israel, Saudi Arabia
The United States has played a vital role in the decades-long catastrophe that has engulfed Palestine. U.S. leaders must now confront their country’s and, in many cases, their own personal complicity in this catastrophe.