Dispatch #135 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers Palestinians’ Ramadan During Genocide and Israel Wreaking Brutal Savage Degradation on Palestinians in Gaza

March 18th 2024   1153 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

242 Days Until 2024 Presidential Elections 11/5/2024

633 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights

164 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Assault on Palestinians in Gaza

During the first few weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza, UN officials, international human rights organizations and the non-Western media raised alarms about Israel’s unprecedented behaviors, e.g., attacking hospitals, carpet bombing densely populated urban neighborhoods, destroying UN schools, killing thousands of civilians primarily women and children, targeting and killing journalists. Surely this illegal immoral savagery could not go on.

And yet, more than 5 months later, the savagery continues unabated. With unconditional support and complicity, the US has normalized Israel’s killing, wounding and maiming more than 130,000 Palestinians, normalized Israel’s complete destruction – i.e., razing to the ground – of Gaza’s infrastructure, culture, education, society, and normalized Israel’s forced sequestration of more than 1.5M Palestinians to a tiny corner of Gaza where Israel’s bombing continues, and Israeli tanks and drones kill at will Palestinians being starved who dare to seek aid. The Western media abets the normalization with its sanitized coverage, deliberately de-contextualized reporting, and publishing Israel’s war propaganda.

Ramadan began on March 11^th, traditionally the holiest and most joyful month of the year when Muslims fast each day to reflect/renew their spiritual life, and then celebrate the Iftar with extended family each evening to renew their joy in community.  For Palestinians, this Ramadan occurs in hellish apocalyptic landscape of unimaginable suffering created by the US and Israel that now includes babies and children being starved to death, while thousands more will soon succumb to infections and disease due to Israel’s illegal siege.  

While Palestinians’ physical wounds are gruesomely evident, the less evident emotional wounds are as deep and profoundly life-altering.  The absolute degradation imposed by Israel on the Palestinians is incomprehensibly horrific. Parents are forced by Israel and the US to watch their children crying in misery, being starved by Israel, and are forced to experience helplessness to protect and care for their children.  

What I Witnessed in Gaza Is a Holocaust: Palestinian Writer Susan Abulhawa.

“What’s happening to people isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration of their personhood, of their whole society,” says Abulhawa. “What I witnessed personally in Rafah and some of the middle areas is incomprehensible. www.democracynow.org/2024/3/6/gaza_update 

The Trauma Is Immeasurable: Susan Abulhawa on Israeli Violence in Gaza. 

The degradation is total, says Abulhawa. And on top of that, they’re bombed, day in and out.  People plan their days around trying to get to a single bathroom that’s shared by hundreds of other families. They try to do their best with hygiene, but it’s impossible. It’s degrading, beyond anything you can imagine, to be forced to live like this for months on end, to have no way to protect your children, no way to give them hope, no way to calm their fears. www.democracynow.org/2024/3/11/susan_abulhawa

History will record that Israel committed a holocaust. The Electronic Intifada 6 March 2024. Susan Abulhawa’s article is a diary of her visit to Gaza in late February.

The scarcity of running or clean water degrades the best of us. Everyone does their best with themselves and their children, but at some point, you stop caring.  At some point, the indignity of filth is inescapable. At some point, you just wait for death, even as you also wait for a ceasefire. 

But how does one reckon with losing your entire family, watching and smelling their bodies disintegrate around you in the rubble, as you wait for rescue or death? How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world – your home, family, friends, health, whole neighborhood and country?

No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed. All this while the most powerful forces and voices vilify and blame you for your wretched fate. 

Genocide isn’t just mass murder. It is intentional erasure.  Of histories. Of memories, books and culture. Erasure of potential in a land. Erasure of hope in and for a place. Erasure is the impetus for destroying homes, schools, places of worship, hospitals, libraries, cultural centers, recreational centers and universities.

Genocide is intentional dismantling of another’s humanity. It is the reduction of a proud, educated, high-functioning ancient society into penniless objects of charity, forced to eat the unspeakable to survive; to live in filth and disease with nothing to hope for except an end to bombs and bullets raining on and through their bodies, their lives, their histories and futures.  https://electronicintifada.net/content/history-will-record-israel-committed-holocaust/45006 

For its egregious moral turpitude, Israel surely deserves the status of pariah nation. For its complicity in Israel’s egregious moral turpitude, the US equally deserves this status. The blood-soaked stain on both nations can never be cleansed – future historians will describe how the Holocaust in Europe was used/manipulated to justify a Holocaust in Gaza.

Biden’s announcement about US building a pier to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gazans is ridiculous and hypocritical theater masquerading as foreign policy (not to mention the ludicrous airdrops). While US continues to send weapons and bombs to Israel, and while Israel continues to defy the International Court of Justice rulings that Israel must allow humanitarian aid sufficient to avoid genocide into Gaza, the US once again dutifully provides cover for Israel’s war crimes – in this instance starving civilians -- and renders the International Court of Justice’s authority worthless.  

The only way to ameliorate Israel’s campaign to starve Palestinians to death is an immediate and massive (600 trucks a day) influx of aid. For context, prior to 7 October, 500 trucks entered Gaza daily with approximately 8900 tonnes of life-sustaining food, medicine and other necessities. US airdrops delivered 6 tonnes of food while a ship from Cyprus delivered 181 tonnes of food. Miles of aid trucks are waiting to enter Gaza.  Israel’s laborious inspections using a “dual-use” standard – i.e., could this be used by Hamas – mean wholesale rejections of aid items, e.g., women’s hygiene kits due to small scissors, water desalination pills, wide range of medicines, oxygen tanks, fuel for hospitals. The entire truck is rejected if any item fails the dual use standard. 

The Trauma Is Immeasurable: Susan Abulhawa on Israeli Violence in Gaza.

People don’t have medicines. People are dying from lack of insulin, which, by the way, Israel has banned from coming into Gaza. And they’re dying from diarrhea, because they’re drinking polluted water, and Israel has also banned water treatment, water filtration systems, even handheld ones, simple personal water filtration systems that, you know, Americans use when they go camping.  www.democracynow.org/2024/3/11/susan_abulhawa 

Israel’s inspection process is designed to maintain their campaign of starvation and degradation. Using claims of war zone, Israel continues to attack aid convoys and Palestinians seeking aid.  Unless/until Israel agrees to an immediate ceasefire and suspends its inspection of aid convoys, Palestinians will continue to starve to death, collaborative courtesy of Israel and the US.

Top EU official says Israel failed to prove its accusations against UNRWA.

The EU’s top humanitarian aid official, Janez Lenarcic, has confirmed that Israel did not present any evidence of the claims against UNRWA to him or any official at the EU executive or to any other donor.  Since the initial withdrawal of funding, several countries, including Australia, Sweden and Canada have resumed their donation pledges to UNRWA as they have not seen any evidence backing Israel’s accusations.  https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-163-top-eu-official-says-israel-failed-to-prove-its-accusations-against-unrwa/ 

The US, the major UNRWA funder, has not resumed its pledge to UNRWA despite the lack of evidence for Israel accusations. Indeed, legislation passed by the House and sent to the Senate ends US support for UNRWA -- the only agency capable of delivering and distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza.

More evidence/consequences of Israel’s Extremist-Nationalist-Zionist Project that undergirds the state of Israel.

Olympic ambitions snuffed out by Israel.

At least 160 accredited athletes have been killed since the genocide began in October. Sports grounds are targeted by Israel and stadiums are used as open-air prisons.  https://electronicintifada.net/content/olympic-ambitions-snuffed-out-israel/45096 

A deadly search for phone signals. IDF snipers and drones target Palestinians on rooftops or in open spaces searching for internet signals. https://electronicintifada.net/content/deadly-search-phone-signals/44966 

Maya Wind: Destruction of Gaza’s Universities Part of Broader Israeli Project to Destroy Palestinian Liberation. 

In her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, Israeli scholar Maya Wind discusses Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s universities; the coalescing of Israeli university administrations with the Israeli far right; the move to repress Palestinian organizing on U.S. campuses, including of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace; and how archaeology, law, Middle East studies and other forms of knowledge production have subordinated their research agendas to the requirements of the Israeli state. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/15/maya_wind_part_2