AlterNet: Just How Fucked Up Is the Discourse Surrounding Israel and Palestine?

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/123580/

OK, here are three facts that I think say a lot about how screwy the discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really is ...

1. There is a group of regular AlterNet readers and commenters who, based on my writing about the conflict -- and my own meanderings through the comments boards -- have concluded that I'm a Zionist shill, a stooge of American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who will reflexively defend Israel right or wrong. They see in me a monster without a drop of human empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians. They've accused me of silencing any criticism of Israel by calling those who dare to "speak truth to power" anti-Semites.

They believe this to be true, deep down in their heart of hearts.

2. There is another group of regular AlterNet readers and commenters who, based on the very same body of writing, about the very same conflict, have concluded that I am a vicious anti-Semite bent on nothing short of the annihilation of the Jews. Some, perhaps guessing at my heritage because of my surname, suggest that I am a self-loathing Jew, working out some deep psychological issues by calling for Israeli blood to flow freely on the streets. They accuse me of spewing eliminationist rhetoric and see me as being immune to the horrors of terrorism perpetrated against innocents. They see me as a "useful idiot" for a global Islamo-fascist movement.

This, they believe in their heart of hearts.

3. I am, in fact, neither pro-Palestinian* nor pro-Israeli per se; I have a background in security studies and international conflict resolution, and I have a strong belief in international law and a universalist view of human rights. I believe that both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have the desire and the right to live in peace and that a majority within both groups (or a plurality when the conflict heats up) want little more and find the rejectionists on both sides odious and deserving of blame for the continuation of the bloodshed.

In other words, neither of these groups of readers' impressions -- perfectly divergent -- comes anywhere within miles of my actual views (which I've written about at length).

And that's the point of this post -- just a little anecdote suggesting how hard it is to solve a bloody, decades-long, incredibly tragic conflict dominated by ideologues who just hear what they want to hear.

* Obviously, in the context of our ridiculously binary, pathetically oversimplified discourse around Israel and Palestine, I can rightly be considered "pro-Palestinian."


Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/123580/

U.S.-backed Israeli massacre in Gaza, continued...

The latest numbers from Gaza put further truth to the lies told not only by the corporate defense contractor-owned media outlets but even by our Democratic representatives in the Senate and the House, like Reid and Pelosi.

885 dead and over 3400 wounded. 85% of the dead and injured are civilians, almost one third of them are children.

There is increasing evidence of the use by the Israeli military of white phosphorus, a substance that burns human flesh to the bone and is considered illegal internationally and its use a war crime. Hospitals are reporting more and more deep burns which cannot even be cleaned and dressed for lack of gauze, which tends to burn when in contact with residual phosphorus anyway.

For those who continue to parrot the party line calling this massacre retaliation for the missile attacks by Hamas into southern Israel, be advised that until 2 weeks ago, a total of 17 Israeli civilians had been killed by those rockets. The number of Palestinian civilian deaths due to Israeli rocket fire runs well into the thousands. While the violence on both sides needs to be quashed, rest assured that the Hamas government is well within their right of resistance to retaliate for the year-long Israeli blockade of food, medical supplies, energy and water into Gaza. The murderous apartheid government of Israel is indeed the aggressor.

Guerrilla warfare, called terrorism by powerful in order to further vilify their enemies, is always necessary when resisting violent occupation of wildly disproportionate military might. If this be terrorism, what then to call the collective punishment being so horribly meted out by the Israeli military for home-made rocket launches? The notion of the right to defend the citizenry runs both ways, does it not?

It is interesting to note that this obvious holocaust of ethnic cleansing is being carried out by Israel, who should know better the pain of such attempts at genocide.

Pete

Brian Eno: Stealing Gaza

It's a mistake to believe that celebrities have some sort of wisdom that we uncelebrated folk lack simply because our culture has been usurped by mass media and they happen to be its players. However, when a celebrity lands a commentary on Counterpunch and I read it, wondering why the hell I didn't write it, I feel the need to post it to my relatively harmless blog. That he's a groundbreaking musician and artist helps, too, as far as this music freak is concerned.--Pete

Stealing Gaza
By Brian Eno, Counterpunch
It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.

Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State

If Hamas Did Not Exist
By Jennifer Lowenstein, Counterpunch


Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel’s will is at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated “calls” for a “ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world’s bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.

The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of the Empire’s obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.

This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world’s population. The primary symbols today are Islamic – the mosques, the Qur’an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.

There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.

Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’ begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?

The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.

It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United States—it voted against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions.

Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.

Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.

Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the ‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?

The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at amadea311@earthlink.net

Inside Gaza: A Living Hell

By Sami Abdel-Shafi, Independent UK
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/115727/inside_gaza%3A_a_living_hell/

I am safe, and yet I feel like a walking dead person. Everything around me shows it. It is hard to write something of any coherence while exposed to cold winter air and to the smell that lingers after the detonation of Israeli bombs. They must have been massive. During the bombing I opened all the windows around my apartment to avoid them imploding as a result of the vacuum shocks sweeping through Gaza City after each enormous bang. While the bombing continued, I jumped down two flights of stairs to my father's house, to make sure he was OK. Should I open up all his windows too? That would expose the old man to the risk of illness. We have no medical care or medication. However, the risk from shattering glass was greater, so I opened them all.

Mobile phones did not work, because of electricity outages and the flood of attempted calls. I flipped the electricity generator on so that we could watch the news. We wanted to understand what was going on in our own neighborhood. However, this was impossible. Israeli surveillance drones flew overhead, scrambling the reception. All I could do was step outside, where I found crowds of frantic people, lines of rising smoke and the smell of charred buildings and bodies that lay around targeted sites nearby. Somebody said the bombs had been launched in parallel raids over the entire Gaza Strip. What was the target here? Perhaps a police station about 200 meters away. Other bombs annihilated blocks less than a kilometer away, where one of the main police training centers stood. When the strikes began, a graduation ceremony for more than 100 recruits in a civil law enforcement program was under way. These were the young men trained to organize traffic, instil civil safety and maintain law and order. Many of them were killed, it is said, in addition to the Gaza Strip's police chief.

News came by word of mouth. There had been more than 150 deaths and more than 200 people were injured or missing under rubble after the first two hours of bombing. Israel had said it would continue the offensive and deepen it if necessary. Likewise, it was said that Hamas had launched more rockets at southern Israeli towns, causing one death and four injuries. Gaza had never seen anything like the numbers of dead bodies lying on its streets. Hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside.

Bombs targeting a Hamas security force building badly damaged an adjacent school, and several children were injured. We heard of many other targets around the Gaza Strip. It reminds me of the "shock and awe" campaign the Allies launched over Baghdad in 2003. But shock and awe did not bring stability or peace.

These bombs were launched by Israel, as we had known they would be. The world watched the situation simmer then boil over, but did nothing. There are some who believe that hell is divided into different classes. The ordinary people of Gaza have long been caught in the tormenting underworld. Now, if the world does not heed what has happened here, our situation will worsen. We will be trapped in the first class of hell.

© 2008 Independent UK All rights reserved.

Israel attack on Gaza: Fragile peace shattered again

The young Palestinian cadets who gathered in Gaza City’s police headquarters on Saturday would have been buzzing with excitement as they prepared for their passing out ceremony.

By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem
Last Updated: 8:34PM GMT 27 Dec 2008

A Palestinian cradles the body of a Hamas policeman as others look for survivors outside the Hamas police headquarters following the Israeli air strike on Gaza City.

Proud mothers and fathers would have been invited to the parade, where the salute was to be taken by Major-General Tawfiq Jaber, the commander of the police force in the Gaza Strip, which has been controlled by the militant Islamist movement, Hamas, since June 2007.

What nobody on the ground knew was that, just as the band played and the cadets formed up to march past Gen Jaber, they were in the cross-hairs of the Israeli air force.

It is not yet known if the gathering was hit by a guided missile or, as is more likely, a laser-guided bomb. What is certain is that a huge explosion ripped through the scene, killing at least 40 people, including the General.

Within minutes fifty sites, all Hamas police and security force facilities located from Rafah in the south to Gaza City in the north, were attacked by 60 jet fighters. Saturday is a normal working day in Gaza and all these buildings were occupied.

Plumes of thick black smoke rose into the grey winter sky the length and breadth of the Strip as the first wave of Israeli air strikes took place.

F-16 jets were heard overhead, along with the clatter of helicopter gunships and the whine of engines from unmanned drones.

At ground level, the air was filled the sound of ambulance sirens and the wailing of relatives gathered at Gaza’s numerous mortuaries, places that have seen plenty of carnage-fuelled grief over the years.

Once the smoke and dust cleared at the police headquarters, rescuers gingerly began searching the scene for signs of life. There were few.

Most of the fatalities appeared to be in uniform, although it is probable civilians were killed in the police compound.

With Israel restricting the entry of foreign reporters to Gaza, authoritative accounts of what happened came from local sources. The Telegraph’s fixer in Gaza went into mourning after losing a cousin in the attack.

A local television cameraman filmed uniformed bodies piled up on top of each other as all around the wounded writhed in pain.

Rescuers carried those showing signs of life to cars and ambulances, while others tried to revive the unconscious. Several of the rescuers beat their heads and shouted: "Allahu akbar (God is greatest)." One badly wounded, prostrate man quietly recited verses from the Koran.

Islam Shahwan, the Hamas police spokesman, gave the death toll at the police headquarters as at least forty. This was the most prominent target of Israel’s most punishing assault on the Gaza Strip since the end of the Second Intifada in 2004.

The Israeli government gave the green light for the military operation at a meeting of the National Security Cabinet on Christmas Day. The NSC met to deliberate how to deal with the expiry of a six-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on Dec 19.

Hopes for a renewal of the truce had been scuppered by tit-for-tat exchanges that began when Israeli ground forces raided Gaza in November. Their aim was to close down a tunnel linking Gaza with neighbouring Egypt. Militants were preparing to use this to smuggle in rockets to launch at southern Israel.

That ground operation, during which three Palestinian fighters were killed, sealed the fate of the ceasefire. The militants began to fire rockets in large numbers at the towns of southern Israel for the first time in months, placing commanders under immediate pressure to respond.

Israel will hold a general election in February and politicians cannot appear anything but robust in dealing with the threat posed by rocket fire from Gaza.

After the NSC’s decision to authorise a military operation, the only question was what kind of attack would follow. Israel has used ground forces before, but this has never provided a lasting solution to the menace of the rockets launched from Gaza.

This time, Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, Ehud Barak, the defence minister, and other security chiefs decided on something quite different.

Instead of a ground offensive or pinprick air attacks, they would order a massive air assault on all known Hamas security targets. Hamas operatives did not fire all the rockets launched from Gaza - other militant groups such as the Islamic Jihad Party fired many. But Israel believes that Hamas, as the governing power in Gaza, could be held responsible and targeted accordingly.

The office of Ehud Olmert, Israel’s outgoing prime minister, issued a statement explaining that the "cabinet has tasked the prime minister, foreign minister and defense minister with deciding on the time and manner of the said action". this added: "Following a unanimous decision, the three have decided on the Israeli Air Force strike which took place this morning. Israel stresses that it will continue to take action against the terror attacks and rocket fire emanating form Gaza against Israeli citizens.’’

After the first round of air attacks, the Israeli air force sent up patrols to deal with the predicted wave of retaliatory rocket launches.

After the initial round of strikes, sources inside Gaza reported more explosions as the air force sought to destroy rocket-launching parties.

However, they failed to stop all the retaliation. Late in the morning, an Israeli man was killed by a rocket in the Israeli town of Netivot. He was the first Israeli to die as a result of Palestinian rocket attacks since June.

In total, nine Israelis have been killed by rockets launched from Gaza since 2005, when it withdrew from the territory and dismantled all settlements.

Yesterday alone saw over 200 Palestinian deaths.

Telegraph, U.K. story

US vetoes motion on Gaza attack

The US has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning an Israeli attack in Gaza that killed 18 civilians, including women and children.

The draft, which also condemned Israeli military operations in Gaza, followed Wednesday's attack in Beit Hanoun.

The US ambassador at the UN, John Bolton, described the text as unbalanced and politically motivated.

Ten of 15 Security Council members backed the resolution. Four abstained - Denmark, Japan, Slovakia and the UK.

This was the second time this year the US used its veto on a draft resolution on Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The US has a history of vetoing resolutions condemning Israel which it feels are biased against the country, says the BBC's Laura Trevelyan at the UN in New York.

'Not even-handed'

The draft resolution - backed by Arab, Islamic and non-aligned states and formally proposed by Qatar - called for a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip.

It also asked the UN secretary general to set up a fact-finding mission into the deaths in Beit Hanoun.

The draft urged the Palestinian Authority to act to end violence - including rockets fired at southern Israel.

The US ambassador said he regretted the Palestinian loss of life, but disagreed with the language used in the resolution.

"This resolution does not display an even-handed characterisation of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to which we aspire and for which we are working assiduously," he said.

'Green light'

An Israeli government spokesman described the veto as "very satisfactory".

"The draft resolution did not stipulate that what happened at Beit Hanun was a tragic error," Avi Pazner told AFP news agency.

But Palestinian cabinet spokesman Ghazi Hamad of Hamas told Reuters the veto was "a signal that the US had given legitimacy to the massacres and a green light to [Israel] to ... carry out more massacres".

Qatar's ambassador said the credibility of the Security Council had been called into question by the vote and the cycle of violence in the Middle East would continue.

Israel launched its operation in and around Beit Hanoun last month in an effort to root out militants firing rockets.

The deaths were caused when what witnesses described as a volley of tank shells hit a built-up civilian area. Many of the dead were from one extended family, and included several women and children.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apologised for the attack, describing it as a "technical failure".

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6139968.stm

Solidarity With Gaza

The International Action Center condemns the criminal U.S.-backed Israeli bombing massacre on Gaza, and the mass murder of 200 and serious wounding of another 300 Palestinians. We call upon the progressive, anti-war and workers’ movement in the United States to join the angry, growing worldwide protests of these latest Israeli war crimes with U.S. complicity. We refuse impunity to the Israeli state and its backers.

The rightist Zionist regime had the arrogance to announce in advance its intention to strike Gaza’s embattled civilians. Like every serious Israeli move, this latest assault was done with a U.S. green light using U.S. weapons and spy services.

Compounding this arrogance, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has already said, "The operation will go on and be intensified as long as necessary," (AFP, Dec. 27) exposing his genocidal intent. The Israeli attacks, targeting civilian population centers and coinciding with the end of the school day, reveal a malicious intent to inflict as many casualties as possible, including on children.

Under Israeli siege for over a year, the people of Gaza had been struggling to survive with insufficient food, power and a damaged and depleted medical-care system. The world has condemned this siege as an Israeli crime against humanity. The Israelis have carried out this murderous siege without protest from their powerful allies in Western Europe and the United States. And the Palestinian people in Gaza have faced down the siege over 18 months, providing once again an example for the world’s people that the criminal U.S.-Israeli alliance has grown desperate to tear down.

Like the bombing, the siege itself is a U.S.-Israeli war crime, with the billions in yearly U.S. aid used to bomb the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, cut off their electricity, and kick them out of their homes. Meanwhile, back home, the same U.S. government lets banks foreclose on workers’ homes and bosses lay off millions of workers and let tens of millions live in fear of an illness that will wipe out their savings—if the crisis hasn’t already.

We have no interest in allowing the U.S.-Israeli genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people of Gaza. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people against U.S. imperialism and Israel, Washington’s outpost in the Middle East.

We demand that U.S. aid to Israel be cut to zero, and that this money be used instead for reparations for the Palestinian people, to ensure their right to return, and for homes, jobs, health care and education for working people in the U.S.

Protest demonstrations have taken place already in Amman, Damascus, Cairo, in the cities of the West Bank and in mostly Arab towns within Israel’s 1967 boundaries. Organizations in Brussels, Madrid and other European centers have also called for protests. In the United States, the first action has been called for New York’s Rockefeller Center, at 50th Street and Fifth Avenues, for 2 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 28.

There demonstrators will say:

Defend Palestine!

Solidarity with heroic Gaza!

Stand in solidarity with Palestine!


ALL OUT TO PROTEST THE MASSACRES IN GAZA!