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"This research provides a view into just how embedded the corporate, profit-fueled war machine is in our higher education and cultural institutions," said one campaigner.
A trio of human rights groups on Wednesday announced a new interactive initiative exposing what the coalition is calling a "Genocide Gentry" of weapons company executives and board members and "54 museums, cultural organizations, universities, and colleges that currently host these individuals on their boards or in other prominent roles."
The coalition—which consists of the Adalah Justice Project, LittleSis, and Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE)—published a map and database detailing the "educational and cultural ties to board members of six defense corporations" amid Israel's ongoing annihilation of Gaza, for which the U.S.-backed country is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
" Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza and nearly 200 cultural heritage sites since October 2023, using bombs and weapons manufactured by the companies included in the Genocide Gentry research," the coalition said. "As of April, these attacks have killed more than 5,479 students and 261 teachers and destroyed or critically damaged nearly 90% of all school buildings in Gaza."
"Universities across the country including the likes of Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and New York University have remained largely silent on Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza," the groups added. "Behind closed doors, these same universities are hosting executives and board members of the companies manufacturing the weapons used in these attacks as board members, trustees, and fellows."
Members of the Genocide Gentry include:
"Students on university campuses across the country have not only been demanding divestment, but transparency," said Sandra Tamari, executive director of the Adalah Justice Project. "Transparency about their institutions' investments, partnerships, donors, and decision-makers, and their connections to individuals and companies directly enabling and profiting off war and genocide."
"This research helps provide some of this transparency by illuminating just how embedded the interests of the weapons industry are within our institutions, so we can begin chipping away at the power and influence that they wield," she added.
ACRE campaign director Ramah Kudaimi noted that "as part of its genocide since October 2023, Israel has targeted universities and cultural centers across Gaza, destroying campuses, museums, libraries, and more."
"That this is all backed by the United States means U.S. educational and cultural institutions have a responsibility to consider what their role is in helping end these war crimes, and that starts with reconsidering their connections with the weapons companies profiting from the destruction," Kudaimi said.
Munira Lokhandwala, director of the Tech and Training program at LittleSis, said: "This research provides a view into just how embedded the corporate, profit-fueled war machine is in our higher education and cultural institutions. Through this research, we show how the defense industry shapes and influences our civic and cultural institutions, and as a result, their silence around war and genocide."
"We must ask our institutions: What role are you playing in whitewashing war and destruction by inviting those who profit from manufacturing weapons onto your boards and into your galas?" she added.
Israel’s omnicide in Gaza has destroyed much of its already-stressed water infrastructure, and women and children suffer for it.
In late 2020, a report titled
Saving Gaza Begins With Its Waterstated:
The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave... The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.
Fast forward to 2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.
The authors of Saving Gaza Begins With Its Water end on a cautiously positive note. “The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise,” they wrote, ...“because Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation” because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.
But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus. At the current rate of killing and death, 15-20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a United Nations expert stated and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.
What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war.
Prior to the current war, Gaza had more than 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water. By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them. Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5% of typical levels.
With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under five in Gaza jumped 2,000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to die from the illness than from Israeli military violence.
More than three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of Israeli bombing. In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza, there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no running water.
Every human being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes), and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons, who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Women and their children are its gravest victims. Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without anesthesia. More than 25,000 children have lost one or both parents.
Recently members of the Uncommitted National Movement spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention and accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Palestinians in Gazan. At the same conference, American doctors who had volunteered in Gaza pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.” None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”
As of early 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, soap, running water, and toilets because of the war nor privacy to manage menstrual hygiene. These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections. The challenge of trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.
By early March 2024 Relief/Web reported: There has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities to deliver their babies. Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.
Although mothers and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last, less, and least.
What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war. Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination, and courage, it is not unachievable.” But first the war must be ended.
Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force, enforcing apartheid conditions for Palestinians in Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza. The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years. Without justice—the U.S. ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent cease-fire, the U.N. recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries—there can be no peace.
Pat Hynes gave a talk on the plight of women in water-starved Gaza during a conference on Memorial Day weekend sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom entitled Water on the Frontlines for Peace. This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.
One expert even asked if Israel's United Nations membership should be reconsidered given the country "seems to have zero respect" for the world body.
United Nations human rights experts warned Monday that Israel risks becoming an international "pariah" over its ongoing assault on Gaza—for which it is on trial for genocide at the world body's International Court of Justice.
The special rapporteurs—who are appointed by the U.N. but do not speak on its behalf—condemned Israel's human rights violations against Palestinians, as well as its blatant disregard for international law and multiple rulings from the ICJ.
These include an advisory opinion that the 57-year Israeli occupation of Palestine is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end, and orders for Israeli forces to avoid genocidal actions in Gaza and to immediately halt the Rafah offensive.
George Katrougalos, the U.N. special rapporteur on the promotion of democratic and equitable international order and a former Greek foreign minister, said during a press conference that the "first obligation" for harmonious relations between nations "is for everybody to respect the United Nations rules."
"This is not happening in the case of Israel," Katrougalos noted.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian relief says that around 200 of its staff members have been killed in more than 450 Israeli attacks on agency facilities since October. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed while seeking shelter under the U.N. flag.
Overall, more than 146,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since October. Almost all of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, and Israel's "complete siege" has caused widespread starvation—sometimes deadly—and sickness throughout the coastal enclave.
Comparing the international community's reaction to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Israel's war on Gaza, Katrougalos stressed that "we cannot anymore stand this kind of double standards and hypocrisy."
"I trust that the progressive and democratic citizens of Israel would not let their country become a pariah like South Africa [had] become during the times of apartheid," he added. South Africa is leading the genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, said that "I think it's unavoidable for Israel to become a pariah in the face of its continuous, relentless, vilifying assault of the United Nations, on top of millions of Palestinians."
"Shockingly, in the face of the abyss reached in the OPT... most member states remained inactive at best, or [are] actively aiding and assisting Israel's criminal conduct," she continued.
"Should there be a consideration of its membership as part of this organization, which Israel seems to have zero respect for?" Albanese added.
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, warned that "we are blowing up the United Nations if we don't react" to Israel's human rights violations.
Arrojo-Agudo added that, as with starvation, Israel is using deprivation of water as a "weapon" and disavowed Israel's claim that Hamas—which led the October 7 attack on Israel—has "completely mismanaged water in Gaza."
The special rapporteurs' remarks came as representatives of U.N. member states gathered in New York for this year's annual General Assembly. General debate sessions are set for next week.