Category: News

Executive Summary

Read more at Al-Shabaka

What is happening is, quite simply, annihilation. Yet our politicians keep funding it and media outlets normalize it

Where do I even start? In recent weeks I’ve sat down to try and write about Gaza and, every time I steel myself to write about one atrocity, another atrocity is committed. Palestinian journalists have been burned alive, babies have frozen to death, medics have been executed and buried in mass graves, kids are being killed in their sleep. Meanwhile, in the US and Germany, speaking out about dead Palestinian babies can land you on a deportation list. Arguing that international human rights law should be respected can put you at risk of being snatched off the street and stuck in a detention centre.

I don’t know where to start and I don’t know what is really left to say at this point. After 18 months of endless carnage, it should be clear to everyone that this is not a war. That this is not self-defence. What is happening in Gaza is, quite simply, annihilation. A litany of genocide experts have stated this. Respected international organizations like Amnesty International have concluded that Israel is committing genocide – and yet our politicians are still funding this.

Read more on The Guardian

Rumeysa Ozturk, a visa holder, was snatched off the streets by Ice agents and sent to a detention center 1,000 miles away for opposing war crimes in Gaza

Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.

It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.

Read more on The Guardian

The Oscar-winning Palestinian film director Hamdan Ballal has said that Israeli settlers who attacked him were aided by two Israeli soldiers who beat him with the butt of their rifles outside his home and threatened to kill him.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ballal, one of the four directors of the film No Other Land, which documented the destruction of villages in the West Bank and won best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards, recounted how on Monday two Israeli soldiers first encircled him while a settler was assaulting him, before violently striking him on the head and threatening to shoot him.

Read more on The Guardian

To the Columbia University administration,

As journalists who were trained by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and who are steeped in America’s long traditions of free speech and academic freedom, we write to you to express our horror at the events of the past week. 

The Trump administration has sent immigration enforcers into university-owned student housing and university public spaces at Columbia, has arrested and sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil – not for having committed any documented crimes, but for the thoughts that he has expressed; and has forced another student, Ranjani Srivasan, to flee to Canada after her visa was revoked, also apparently for thought crimes.

It has sought to financially cripple the university by withholding $400m in federal funds. And it has demanded the university shut down or restructure departments it deems to be politically problematic, and that it alter its criteria for who to admit to incoming student cohorts.

We come from diverse political backgrounds and worldviews; some of us were deeply alienated by last year’s campus protests around the war in Gaza, others of us were sympathetic to the students. Regardless of our political views, however, we firmly believe that the federal government should have no role in policing Columbia’s academic structures, in shaping course requirements and personnel choices made by the university, in dictating admissions strategies, and in terrorizing students for expressing political views that the first amendment clearly protects.

Yet, astoundingly, all of these changes are now being accepted by Columbia University in the vain hope of deterring a predatory government from cutting off federal funds and decimating the university’s science research facilities. The university higher-ups have sold out students and faculty alike in their efforts to access federal dollars.

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In a significant diplomatic move, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has officially recognized Palestine as a state, marking a historic moment in international relations. Sheinbaum, who enjoys an 80% approval rating and is Jewish, reaffirmed her commitment to Palestinian human rights as she welcomed the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Mexico, Nadya Rasheed.

Read more at Pressenza

Redefining antisemitism in the law was never about Jewish safety. It is about consolidating authoritarian power under the veneer of minority protection….

The establishment clause of the US constitution, for instance, prohibits the state from intervening in religious disputes. By adopting the IHRA definition into law, the US government has in effect taken sides in an intra-Jewish debate, recruiting Zionist Jews to side in a war against its ideological opponents. The redefinition of antisemitism is therefore not only an attack on political dissent – it is an intrusion into Jewish religious life. By codifying support for Israel as a requirement for being Jewish, these laws function as a state intervention in an ongoing Jewish theological and ethical debate.

By pushing against the legal redefinition of antisemitism, Jews can refuse to surrender their identity to the state. By continuing to anchor it firmly in their communities, they can resist the instrumentalization of Judaism against others.

Reclaiming religious freedom from the state, as part of this act of resistance, would not just protect Jewish dissenters – it would offer a broader framework for resisting state attempts to control religious identity. No government – not the Israeli government, and surely not the American government – should have the power to define what it means to be a Jew.

Read more on The Guardian

Khirbet Samra is one of the last Palestinian shepherding communities in the West Bank’s eastern flank. State-backed settler militias are driving them out.

From large-scale livestock theft, to home raids and beatings, the violence and displacement spiked in the Jordan Valley after the Israeli military launched “Operation Iron Wall” in January — an offensive that has displaced more than 40,000 Palestinians, primarily in northern West Bank refugee camps — the day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

“It’s very systematic and well planned,” explained Dror Etkes, founder of the Israeli organization Kerem Navot, which monitors settlement activity in the West Bank. Trump’s return and the new military assault in the West Bank, Etkes continued, provided “a clear sign for the settlers to escalate their violence to expel more Palestinians.”

Now, Israel’s takeover of the Jordan Valley is almost complete. Khirbet Samra is located east of the Allon Road, a north-south highway Israel built in the 1970s to connect settlements and lay the groundwork to annex the territory east of the road, which runs along the border with Jordan. But while Israel has been working for decades to ethnically cleanse the Jordan Valley, over the past two years, it has accelerated its efforts at an alarming pace: 100,000 dunams of land east of the Allon Road have been nearly emptied of Palestinians, according to a forthcoming joint report by Yesh Din, an Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit organization, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Read the full article at +972 Magazine

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The Israeli army is building an AI language model using millions of intercepted conversations between Palestinians, which could accelerate the process of incrimination and arrest, a joint investigation reveals.

“AI amplifies power,” an intelligence source who has closely followed the Israeli army’s development of language models in recent years explained. “It allows operations [utilizing] the data of far more people, enabling population control. This is not just about preventing shooting attacks. I can track human rights activists. I can monitor Palestinian construction in Area C [of the West Bank]. I have more tools to know what every person in the West Bank is doing. When you hold so much data, you can direct it toward any purpose you choose.”

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One source described a language model currently in use that scans data and identifies Palestinians using words that indicate “troublemaking.” The source added that the army has used language models to predict who might throw stones at soldiers during operations to “demonstrate presence” — when soldiers raid a town or village in the West Bank and go door to door, storming into every house on a particular street to conduct arrests and intimidate residents. 

Intelligence sources stated that the use of these language models alongside large-scale surveillance in the occupied territories has deepened Israel’s control over the Palestinian population and significantly increased the frequency of arrests. Commanders can access raw intelligence translated into Hebrew — without needing to rely on Unit 8200’s language centers to provide the material, or knowing Arabic themselves — and select “suspects” for arrest from an ever-growing list in every Palestinian locality. “Sometimes it’s just a division commander who wants 100 arrests per month in his area,” one source said.

Read more at 972mag.com