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palestinians
Gaza Flotilla Participants Take Great Risks in the Absence of Government Action
Governments should be using all their leverage to prevent genocide by halting weapons sales to Israel, suspending preferential trade agreements, and imposing targeted sanctions against Israeli officials.
Sep 13, 2025
In the absence of international action to stop the Israeli government from continuing its grave crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, people from around the world are embarking on flotillas aimed at breaking Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, delivering desperately needed aid, and demanding an end to Israel’s atrocities.
This week, a coalition of activists spanning North Africa, the Gulf states, France, and Malaysia launched the Global Sumud Flotilla, despite threats and danger.
On September 8, an explosion took place, igniting fires on board the flotilla’s Family Boat. Organizers said an item dropped by a drone struck the boat, a Portuguese-flagged vessel carrying members of the flotilla’s steering committee in Tunisian waters, which they condemned as a targeted act of intimidation. The next day, organizers reported a second drone attack, releasing footage and an image of a burned item found on deck.
More than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed amid Israel’s assault over the last 23 months in Gaza, including over 2,000 trying to access humanitarian aid. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble and, as the population has come under unrelenting bombardment, most have been forcibly displaced at least once.
Flotillas are a means by which ordinary people can peacefully speak out on the world stage against extermination. But there is no substitute for meaningful action by governments to halt abuses and ensure accountability.
Now, as Israeli forces escalate operations in Gaza City and continue starving the civilian population in defiance of orders from the International Court of Justice, it is urgent for states to act.
Governments should be using all their leverage to prevent genocide by halting weapons sales to Israel, suspending preferential trade agreements, and imposing targeted sanctions against Israeli officials responsible for ongoing abuses.
Flotillas come amid governments’ inaction and can put participants at great risk. Some Gulf participants reported being blocked from traveling by authorities and advised not to participate citing safety concerns. Israeli forces intercepted prior flotillas, detaining and deporting most activists. In 2010, when Israeli forces intercepted the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship participating in a flotilla, they killed nine activists. This incident serves as a reminder for the international community to protect flotilla participants, whom Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has branded as “terrorists.”
Flotillas are a means by which ordinary people can peacefully speak out on the world stage against extermination. But there is no substitute for meaningful action by governments to halt abuses and ensure accountability. Governments should ensure that participants are not obstructed, attacked, or wrongfully prosecuted and press Israel to end its unlawful blockade of Gaza.
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In Palestine, Food Is a Way to Survive, Resist, and Come Together
For the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have continued Indigenous practices in the face of deprivation and foreign occupation.
Sep 12, 2025
Food—and the denial of it—has come into sharp focus with the Israeli occupation’s mass starvation and genocide in Gaza and the increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Famine has been officially declared in Gaza.
The United Nations World Food Programme had estimated that at least 470,000 people have been enduring famine-like conditions in Gaza, a number growing by the day as the siege and blockade of food into Gaza continues
One in 5 children in Gaza suffers from "severe malnutrition" as of late July. When food is available to buy, the prices of essentials are astronomical, and privatized food aid delivery remains erratic, unsafe, and cruel, with several people shot dead while attempting to secure anything they can get to feed their families.
Amid these atrocities and the images of emaciated Palestinians, it is vital to remember that across every village in Palestine, food has not just been a means to survive but the connective tissue to our culture, identity, liberation, resistance, and to our land. Centuries-old food practices live on in the homes of the steadfast residents that remain. The ingredients and where and how they are grown may have changed as a result of decades of occupation and colonial violence, but customs and flavors endure.
Palestinians adapt and resist, and have done so for almost 80 years.
Agricultural practices and communities have adapted and been transformed. Some have vanished with decades of displacement and extermination, while others have stood firm and celebrated a resurgence. Recipes have evolved to make use of new ingredients connected to the struggle for land and resources, and traditions like al-ʿAwna, a system of collective agricultural labor, embody this spirit of adaptation and resilience. Rooted in mutual aid, al-ʿAwna has long repelled colonial tactics of extermination and displacement by providing communal opportunities to cultivate land, acquire food, cook, and support one another.
For Palestinians, food has been a means to prevail.
A History of Adaptation and Mutual Aid
During the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948, more than 530 Palestinian villages were forcibly displaced. People were cut off from their land and farms and lost access to growing Indigenous produce. Many became refugees overnight, pushed into Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries and compelled to take up work in urban areas as settler colonialism eroded links to land and agricultural traditions.
Today, Palestinians have to increasingly buy rather than grow their own food, but the meals prepared with these staple ingredients still feature in kitchens and on dinner tables.
Before 1948, farmers from Silwan, a Jerusalem neighborhood, would grow black-eyed beans and green chard in the Bustan area. Foraging for ingredients like khubayza, nettle, milk thistle, and mulberry leaves was and is still practiced in Palestine. Seeds were distributed among Palestinian communities to grow native fruits and vegetables, including a recent initiative in northern Gaza called Thamara that distributes these seeds to those living in tent camps as a result of Israel’s ongoing military onslaught in the Strip.
Food as solidarity
While Palestinians may have been separated from their land where they grew wheat and sesame, their dishes persisted through new recipes and food traditions from different towns and villages, fused into new culinary traditions. Rummaniyeh—a lentil and eggplant stew cooked in pomegranate juice—was modified by Palestinians from Lid and Ramleh who were displaced into Gaza. There, they added Gazan flavors like ‘ein jarada (dill seeds and chili) and red taheini (sesame sauce), giving birth to a distinct new flavor.
These culinary delights revolved around the concept of takaya (soup kitchens), an Islamic tradition based on communities looking after one another. Solidarity was the basis of food cooked and eaten together.
Many takaya were built hundreds of years ago, with Hebron’s itikea established in the 12th century and still in use today. Others followed during the Ottoman era, such as the Fatmeh Khatun itkiea in Jerusalem near Al-Aqsa Mosque, two takayas in Gaza, one in Al-Bireh, and another one in Jenin. Over time, traditions of takaya and giving became prevalent in every Palestinian town and village. Ouneh and faz’a, cultures of mutual aid through funding and community help, were also established to support those in need. Their existence defies settler colonialism ensuring survival and a sense of community despite threats of erasure (see Jerusalem in the Malmouk Era: History and Architecture, Taawon Publishers, Jerusalem, 2024).
Adapting and handing down recipes in spite of a decades-long history of erasure and dispossession is a way of resistance and for traditions to endure.
Six years ago, an initiative was launched in rural Jerusalem to prepare meals for resisters on Mount Sbih that settlers were attempting to occupy. Another itikea was launched in Jerusalem for hospital patients from Gaza who came to the city to receive treatment.
The occupation has realized that there is strength in our traditions of mutually preparing food and passing our recipes through generations. That is why it has targeted takaya across Palestine, destroying some 42 of them in recent years. But my research has consistently shown that our people and our food can overcome this, too.
Food as Memory
For so many Palestinians, certain dishes are tied to an event and a place in time and can evoke strong memories. Jarysheh, a dish of cracked wheat, meat broth, dried yogurt, and lamb, was a hallmark of weddings and funerals in Lifta and Dayr Yasin. But as elders such as Im Ibrahim, a woman from Dir Yasin, recalls: Jarysheh has not been made for a wedding since the Nakba—it is too deeply connected now with funerals and a sense of loss and death from the infamous Dayr Yasin Massacre on April 9, 1948.
Efforts to elevate Palestinian cuisine and food traditions can help prevent food appropriation and theft by the occupation. Adapting and handing down recipes in spite of a decades-long history of erasure and dispossession is a way of resistance and for traditions to endure.
Food Sovereignty, Survival, and Resistance in the Present Day
Today in Gaza, the soil is forever contaminated with heavy metals from the relentless Israeli bombardment. According to a recent estimate of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Gaza is left with only 1.5% of cropland that is accessible and suitable for cultivation. Last month, in a violent assault on Palestinian food sovereignty, Israeli occupation forces raided and destroyed a Palestinian seed bank in the West Bank city of Hebron. A few weeks ago, in the village of Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah, the Israeli military carried out raids, demolished homes, and seized land. In addition to all the violence and forced displacement against the people of Al-Mughayyir, the Israeli army also uprooted 3,000 olive trees from their land, leaving them without land and olives and struggling for the minimum to survive.
For the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have continued Indigenous practices in the face of deprivation and foreign occupation. Hundreds of takaya have sprung up across the strip and few in Tulkarem and Jenin. Food and money donations pour in, and volunteers help cook food. They have become the primary source of cooked meals for the majority of the displaced population.
What is happening in Palestine today, the starvation and bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli occupation, not only threatens people’s immediate food security, dignity, and health but severely imperils Palestinian food sovereignty. Adaptive practices with deep roots in Palestinian traditions are our hope. They are a means to survive both as people and as a culture and serve as a stark example of Palestinian resilience, resistance, and sense of community. There may no longer be Jarysheh at weddings or black-eyed beans on the farms of Bustan, but there is nevertheless a collective will to survive and, together with our food, outlive the forces that try to erase us.
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'Never Again' Unless Maybe You Thought That Included Palestinians, Holocaust Museum Says By Deleting Post
"Palestinians are so dehumanized that they're excluded from 'never again,'" said one researcher.
Sep 08, 2025
"Unbelievable" yet entirely predictable was how Palestinian rights supporters described a decision by Holocaust Museum LA in Los Angeles over the weekend to take down a social media post that had stated a clear opposition to all genocide, no matter the victims.
The museum had shared a post with its 24,200 Instagram followers last week that read, "Never again can't only mean never again for Jews," repeating a sentiment expressed by Jewish-led human rights groups and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named for the Holocaust survivor who coined the term "genocide."
"Jews were raised to say, 'Never again,'" the post continued. "That means never again. For anyone."
But the post was met with a barrage of angry comments from pro-Israel users and groups including the organization Stop Antisemitism, which calls itself a Jewish civil rights watchdog group and has spent months targeting public figures who criticize Israel's assault on Gaza and express support for Palestinians, more than 63,000 of whom have been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023.
The group—which earlier this year called on the US Department of Justice to investigate whether children's entertainer Ms. Rachel is funded by Hamas due to her support for Palestinian rights—called on donors to the museum to "redirect [their] giving our way, an organization that focuses solely on the Jewish people and fighting the bigotry we face."
An account with 30,000 followers was among those that accused the museum of "feeding into the genocide libel"—suggesting that the finding by numerous international rights organizations, the Lemkin Institute, and Israeli human rights groups that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is comparable to medieval "blood libels" against Jewish people.
The museum responded to the comments by taking down the post and issuing an apology that appeared intent on denying the organization has any concern for Palestinians currently facing a famine orchestrated by the Israeli government and daily attacks as Israel enacts its plan to take over the entire Gaza Strip.
The original post, said the museum, had been intended to "promote inclusivity and community," but was "easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East."
"The was not our intent," the organization added, promising to more thoroughly vet its social media content in the future to ensure its message "always remains clear."
The museum's overall message to the public, suggested the apology, is not that all populations must be protected from genocidal violence—a statement that left Ryan Grim of Drop Site News "speechless."
Grim said the museum's position appeared to be, "If you denounce genocide, some might think you're being critical of Israel and we can't have that."
The apology itself, said Laila Al-Arian of Al Jazeera's "Fault Lines," would not be out of place "in a museum someday showing how genocides happen."
Writer and researcher Ismail Aderonmu added that the museum, which was founded by Holocaust survivors, had stepped back from "the clearest moral lesson of the Holocaust: Never again for anyone."
Human rights lawyer Yasmine Taeb told Al Jazeera that Holocaust Museum LA's original post had simply appeared to acknowledge what "countless genocide scholars and human rights organizations" have already said: that "what Israel is doing in Gaza is textbook definition of genocide."
"It's appalling that a museum established for the purpose of educating the public about genocide and the Holocaust not only refuses to acknowledge the reality of Israel's actions in Gaza, but [is] removing a social media post that merely stated that 'never again' is not intended for just Jews, in order for it to not be interpreted as a response to the genocide in Gaza," Taeb said.
Assal Rad, a researcher at Arab Institute Washington, DC added that the apology was dehumanizing to Palestinians in Gaza and the US.
"Palestinians are so dehumanized that they're excluded from 'never again,'" said Rad. "Apparently their genocide is the exception."
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