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palestine
Massive London March Demands Israeli Arms Embargo After Police Drop Restrictions
"We demand our government completely stop arming Israel and push for a cease-fire now," said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Sep 07, 2024
Thousands of people gathered at London's Picadilly Circus Saturday for the city's latest march against Israel's bombardment of Gaza and the United Kingdom's continued support for the Israel Defense Forces, following what organizers called "a major victory in defense of the democratic right to protest."
The Metropolitan Police on Friday dropped its restrictions on the march, which was the first pro-Palestinian protest since last October to proceed to the Israeli embassy in London.
The police had attempted to stop campaigners from gathering before 2:30 pm, conflicting with plans to begin the rally preceding the march at noon.
"They never provided any convincing explanation or evidence for this delay, and it has caused enormous, unnecessary difficulty to the organization of a large-scale demonstration," Ben Jamal, who leads the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, one of the groups organizing the march, toldMiddle East Eye on Friday.
"It has unfortunately been part of a pattern of obstruction, delay, and lack of communication on the part of the Met which we will press them to review and reflect on for future demonstrations," he added. "For tomorrow, we call on our supporters to turn out in their hundreds of thousands to show we will not be deterred from seeking an end to Israel's genocide and justice for Palestine!"
Jamal said the police "saw sense and abandoned their unjustified and impractical attempt to delay the start of the march by two hours on Saturday," allowing the march to begin at 1:30 pm.
During previous marches in which hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians since last October, police have blocked off the area surrounding the Israeli embassy in Kensington, threatening anyone who protested in the vicinity with arrest.
Marching to the embassy, demonstrators made a "renewed call to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza" and demanded an "immediate and full cessation of arms supplies to Israel."
Earlier this week, the U.K. government announced it was suspending approximately 30 of its 350 arms export licenses for Israel, saying that "there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law."
Human rights advocates, medical professionals working in Gaza, and legal experts have for months demanded that Israel's top international funders, including the U.S. and U.K., stop providing military aid as Israel has blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza and waged attacks on civilian infrastructure, killing more than 40,000 people.
The country has also been accused of carrying out genocide in a case led by South Africa at the International Court of Justice; the court has ordered Israel to end its blockade on humanitarian aid and to prevent genocide in Gaza.
"We demand our government completely stop arming Israel and push for a cease-fire now," said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
As Londoners marched on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 61 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in the last two days. Four people were killed in a strike on Halimah al-Saadiyah school in Jabaliya, where displaced Palestinians have been sheltering, and three were killed in a bombing at Amr Ibn al-As school in Gaza City.
Media outlets in Palestine reported that a baby named Yaqeen al-Astal had become the 37th child in Gaza to die of malnutrition since Israel began its near-total aid blockade.
International outrage also grew on Saturday regarding the killing of a Turkish American activist, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, in the West Bank on Friday. Local media and eyewitnesses said Eygi had been deliberately shot in the head by Israeli forces at a protest over the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.
The U.S. called on Israel to investigate the killing on Friday, but Eygi's family said in a statement that such a probe would not be "adequate."
"We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a U.S. citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties," said the family.
Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the United Nations, called for "a full investigation of the circumstances" and said that "people should be held accountable. And again, civilians must be protected at all times."
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What Does It Really Mean to Say Israel Has the Right to Defend Itself?
If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and listen.
Sep 07, 2024
“As I said then, I say today, Israel had a right—has a right to defend itself.”
This is militarism set in stone. The words are those of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, of course, in her extensive CNN interview last week—quick words that lead the charge and spew the glory, no matter how blatantly false they are.
Oh, and by the way: “Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
She had to add some vague, paradoxical empathy, apparently, just because the nation she hopes to lead—USA! USA!—is kind of growing up, at least a little bit, and a certain (inconvenient) segment of its voters now maintain skepticism about the effectiveness, not to mention the moral sanity, of militarism. Harris, alas, had no intention of addressing the issue with intelligence, nor does the media push her to: What, in fact, does self-defense mean? Does it always, unquestionably, require violence?
The violence in Palestine—in Gaza and also the West Bank—goes on and on, to what end? Nothing I write here is new, but what I want to do is push the matter beyond the realm of glorious, media-certified abstraction. Israel has the right to defend itself. What does that actually look like? Here’s a brief, recent example from the Drop Site:
For nearly a week, the Israeli military has been laying siege to hospitals in Jenin and other cities in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, severely restricting access to medical care, targeting medical workers and ambulances, and cutting off water and electricity, as part of a massive military offensive in the occupied West Bank, the largest operation in the Palestinian territory in over two decades.
...The move mirrors tactics by the Israeli military in Gaza, where every hospital has been targeted and only a fraction are partially functioning, leaving the healthcare system in ruins.
And the Palestine Red Crescent noted that “Israeli troops have ‘directly targeted’ ambulances, injuring two medical workers and a volunteer doctor. ‘Our teams have been prevented from transporting various casualties, patients, and elderly suffering from chronic diseases, and women in labor. The further marginalization of already vulnerable communities renders the area uninhabitable.’”
But Israel has the right to defend itself! Just imagine if the mainstream media refused to report on war—on “self-defense”—as an abstraction, especially when hospitals are being targeted, ambulances are being targeted, refugee camps are being bombed. Even if there’s a justification of some sort for any particular action, this is what self-defense looks like. Real journalism will not quietly look away from it.
Nor will it take events out of context for the purpose of creating a “good guy/bad guy” narrative. Maybe creating such a narrative is part of the game of politics, but honest journalism refuses to submit to it. For instance, as per the website Decolonize Palestine:
Framing is important. Being able to dictate the narrative, to be given the freedom to explain events in a way sympathetic to your worldview, can be an incredibly powerful tool. As many studies have shown, there has been an empirically proven bias toward the Zionist and Israeli narrative in U.S. media. This means that Israelis have had enormous advantages in framing what is happening in Palestine.
In other words, the Hamas attack of October 7 stands all by itself: a shocking act of barbaric violence perpetrated (for no reason except hatred) on innocent Israelis. But in fact, horrific as the act was, it happened within a context: seven decades of Israeli occupation, Gaza turned into an open-air concentration camp, Palestinians living without freedom and dignity.
Ignoring this is the equivalent, let us say, of a Hollywood-constructed brutal Indian attack on a wagon train of American settlers. The white guys are the victims! They have a right to defend themselves.
But this is just the starting point. Journalism is supposed to speak truth to power. This is easy to say, but truth is not necessarily simple—let alone simplistic.
Israel has the right to defend itself. Let me take a moment here to agree with would-be President Harris. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But what does that actually mean? Self-defense is far, far more than an us-vs.-them standoff. If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and listen. And of course, this truth goes in all directions.
Anyone who isn’t aware of this is... deeply ignorant? Or do I simply mean part of both parties’ voting base? I listen to Harris triumphantly declare that the United States has the most lethal military force on the planet, followed by a resonating cheer from the voters, and it all sounds as phony as the worst movie script I can imagine. But apparently we remain trapped in our military budget.
As I wrote a few months ago: “We will not enter the future with closed minds. We will not find security—we will not evolve—if we choose to remain subservient to linear, us-vs.-them thinking. We will not become our fullest selves or have access to our own collective human consciousness if we choose to stay caged in our own righteous certainty.”
And yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. So does Palestine. So do all of us—we have the right to defend ourselves from our own militarism.
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Israeli Forces Reportedly Kill US Human Rights Activist With 'Deliberate Shot to the Head'
"A soldier fired directly at the protestors, hitting the American activist in the head from behind," said one eyewitness.
Sep 06, 2024
One journalist said that "devastating levels of impunity" were on display in the West Bank on Friday as Israeli forces reportedly shot a 26-year-old American human rights advocate, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, in the head, killing her as she protested the expansion of illegal settlements.
AJ+, Al Jazeera's digitial platform, reported that according to eyewitness accounts, Eygi was killed by a "deliberate shot to the head."
Eygi, who had dual citizenship in the U.S. and Turkey, was taking part in a campaign to protect Palestinian farmers from violence by Israeli settlers, 700,000 of whom live in illegal settlements erected over the last five decades in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Israel rejects the position of the United Nations' highest court that the settlements violate international law, and the U.S. has continued to be the largest funder of the Israeli military despite thousands of deadly attacks by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and settlers on Palestinians—and activists trying to protect them—in the West Bank.
The protest where Eygi was killed was in the town of Beita, near the settlement of Evyatar, which was authorized by Israel last year.
"Just as the prayers were finishing, the Israeli military started firing tear gas and stun grenades towards the protestors," Hisham Dweikat, a resident of Beita, toldCNN. "As people were running away, live fire was shot and a soldier fired directly at the protestors, hitting the American activist in the head from behind and falling to the ground."
Suhauna Hussain, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, said on X that Eygi lived in the Seattle area and had recently graduated from the University of Washington.
Israel has intensified attacks on the West Bank in recent months, despite the government's claim that it is targeting Hamas, which operates in Gaza, in the current conflict that began last October.
On Friday, Israeli forces withdrew from the city of Jenin and its refugee camp after a 10-day operation that killed at least 36 Palestinians, including children. The U.N. warned Israel was using "lethal war-like tactics" this week as the IDF destroyed civilian infrastructure and carried out drone strikes in Jenin.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the Biden administration was "aware of the tragic death of an American citizen" in the West Bank and that officials were "urgently gathering more information."
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian American member of Congress, demanded that the State Department clarify how eyewitnesses and Palestinian media have characterized Eygi's death.
"How's they die, Matt?" said Tlaib. "Was it magic? Who or what killed Aysenur? Asking on behalf of Americans who want to know."
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