Dispatch #118 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers US Ignores International Laws & Sends More Weapons to Support Israel’s Mass Killing of Palestinians.

Dec. 11th 2023   

1055 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

43 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

535 Days Since Supreme Court Ruled Women Don’t Have Human Rights

The death toll in Gaza is more than 25,000 Palestinians – at least 18,000 reported by the Gaza Health Ministry plus several thousands buried under the rubble – with more than 50,000 reported injured. The Ministry said the death toll no longer includes new casualties in the north where all hospitals are closed.

On Friday December 8^th, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. Thirteen of the Council’s 15 members voted in favor and the UK abstained. On Saturday, Secretary of State Blinken confirmed that he used an emergency declaration to expedite sending 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition valued at more than $106 million to Israel, bypassing a congressional review process required for arms sales to foreign nations.

Humanitarian aid groups warned on Saturday that thousands of children in the territory were at risk of dying from starvation. Save the Children, a British charity, said that it had documented at least 7,685 children under the age of 5 who were so malnourished that they required “urgent medical treatment to avoid death.”

In addition to the lack of food, the United Nations has repeatedly warned of the risk of epidemics in Gaza amid conditions that Philippe Lazzarini, the director of the United Nations agency that assists Palestinians, has described as “untenable." In a summary of the conditions posted on social media on Friday, Mr. Lazzarini depicted increasingly dystopian scenes across Gaza, with 700 people using a single toilet, tens of thousands of Gazans sleeping in the open air — on streets and in courtyards — and dozens of women giving birth daily in makeshift refugee camps.

Some of the sharpest criticism of the U.S. veto came from aid organizations. “By vetoing this resolution, the U.S. stands alone in casting its vote against humanity,” Avril Benoit, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, said in a statement on Friday. “The U.S. veto makes it complicit in the carnage in Gaza.”  www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/world/middleeast/us-cease-fire-gaza-criticism.html 

Biden chooses that US continues to be 100% complicit with Israel’s public campaign of war crimes. Israel’s savagery is breathtaking; with all their surveillance drones, precision-guided bombs, comprehensive intelligence about everyone and everything in Gaza, IDF forces are playing a video game using Palestinians for their AI-generated targets. 

The US now establishes the precedent and principle that human rights, international law, Geneva conventions, humanitarian law, and the UN are irrelevant to the conduct of global affairs. As December 10^th marked the 75^th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the global community must face a new level of inhumanity, lawlessness and terror.  If a country is powerful enough, then it can do whatever it wants.

Jehad Abusalim, Executive Director of the Jerusalem Fund, paid tribute to his friend Refaat Alareer, the acclaimed Palestinian academic and activist killed by an Israeli airstrike. Alareer taught English at Gaza University and believed that language could be a weapon against oppression and a tool for liberation as Palestinian stories written in English could reach audiences beyond Gaza. Abusalim includes this quote from Alareer: “Writing is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We live for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival, and of hope” and further comments:

I can tell you that the scale of loss, the tragedy that has befallen the academic, scholarly and intellectual community in Gaza and in Palestine, is unprecedented. Israel is destroying the foundations of society in the Gaza Strip. Israel is systematically destroying our educational system, our cultural institutions. And today we saw footage of the Grand Omari Mosque in Gaza, a structure that dates back to thousands of years, also in ruins. This is a genocidal war of erasure, of uprooting and of mass destruction.

We mourn our teachers, our educators, our doctors, our nurses, our friends, our neighbors. And we also are mourning the loss of a society as we knew it, that no longer exists. And this is all happening while the world is watching, leaving Palestinians in Gaza endure one of the largest bombardment campaigns in the 21st century. www.democracynow.org/2023/12/8/jehad_abusalim_on_refaat_alareer_death

Abusalim concludes reading this recent poem by Alareer:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up

above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.