Dispatch #143 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers the Courageous Students Condemning Genocide Being Attacked by Riot Police While Biden Sends Another $1B for Israel’s Voracious Genocide

May 17th 2024     1212 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

183 Days Until 2024 Presidential Elections 11/5/2024

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

224 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Assault on Palestinians in Gaza

Israel closes the Rafah crossing and continues its invasion of Rafah with 150 air strikes each day belying Western media reporting about “tensions in Rafah” and Biden’s claim that Israel hasn’t yet invaded Rafah.  Israel begins another massive bombing campaign in northern Gaza destroying residential areas to where Israel had allowed Palestinians to return. 

Displacement Has Been Weaponized”: Gaza Reporter Akram al-Satarri on Israeli Attack & Fleeing Rafah 

Over 450,000 Palestinians, many already internally displaced, have fled Rafah in the past week alone since Israel launched an offensive on the city. Another 100,000 have been forced to flee homes in the north of Gaza amid escalated bombing and ground attacks. “Displacement has been weaponized,” al-Satarri says, citing the experiences of families who have been displaced as many as eight times since the start of Israel’s assault. 

“People are suffering. They are deprived of everything,” al-Satarri adds, due to Israel’s seizure and closure of the Rafah border crossing, preventing food, water, supplies or aid from reaching the famine-stricken population. “They are trying to prepare the Palestinians for full subjugation,” he continues. Life in Gaza is “unimaginable; however, Gazans are living it.”  www.democracynow.org/2024/5/14/akram_al_satarri

Israel’s war on Gaza live: Deadly fighting rages in north’s evacuation zone 16 May 2024

The International Rescue Committee says the “scale of the crisis defies imagination” in southern Gaza as Israeli ground forces invade Rafah and mass displacement leaves people in need of food and water.  

Blinne Ni Gralaigh, lawyer for South Africa at the genocide case at the World Court says there has been one child killed or wounded in Gaza every 10 minutes since Israeli’s military attacks began. He also quoted an Israeli reservist active in Gaza as saying soldiers treat Israel-ordered evacuation areas as “extermination zones.” www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/5/16/israels-war-on-gaza-live-mass-displacement-as-israelis-intensify-assaults 

Israel-Gaza war live: Netanyahu says Israel has to ‘do what we have to do’ on Rafah offensive despite US ‘disagreement.’ 

Israeli prime minister acknowledges split with Washington but says he will act to ‘protest the life of our nation’ www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/may/15/israel-gaza-war-rafah-hamas-middle-east-latest-news-updates 

Biden’s shifting ‘red line’ allows Israel to keep getting away with murder – Mondoweiss mondoweiss.net/2024/05/bidens-shifting-red-line-allows-israel-to-keep-getting-away-with-murder/

US approves $1bn arms package to Israel in apparent U-turn. 15 May 2024

The US has given the green light to a $1 billion arms package for Israel, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intensified his military onslaught against the Palestinians in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, where 1.5 million displaced people have been seeking shelter. The move comes after President Joe Biden had previously warned Netanyahu that an assault on Rafah would cross a “red line,” leading his administration to temporarily halt arms transfers to Israel. www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240515-us-approves-1bn-arms-package-to-israel-in-apparent-u-turn/ 

Central Gaza pushed beyond breaking point. Abubaker Abed The Electronic Intifada 15 May 2024   

Israel’s invasion of Rafah has caused yet another mass displacement during a genocidal war. Following evacuation orders and numerous attacks, people have fled Gaza’s southernmost city in their hundreds of thousands. Among their destinations are Deir al-Balah in the Middle Area. 

The resulting increase in its population presents serious logistical challenges for the local authorities. Before Israel declared its current war on Gaza, Deir al-Balah was relatively small. The city itself had a population of less than 10,000. “Numbers have skyrocketed since the latest evacuation of Rafah,” Fakher al-Kurd of the Deir al-Balah municipality said.  https://electronicintifada.net/content/central-gaza-pushed-beyond-breaking-point/46416 

No water, food, health care, toilet’: Desperation deepens in Gaza’s camps

Hundreds of new shelters set up near Khan Younis as Palestinians flee fighting in Rafah. www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/15/no-water-food-health-care-toilet-desperation-deepens-in-gazas-camps 

Across the country and across the world, university students are protesting the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s apartheid and demanding universities divest from companies associated with Israel’s military.  Instead of talking and negotiating with these courageous and disciplined students, college and university leaders instead order riot police to violently break up Palestinian solidarity encampments and arrests hundreds of students and faculty.  

The Kids Are Not All Right. They Want to Be Heard | The New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, May 8 2024. What explains the student movement against the war in Gaza? Sometimes the correct answer is the one right in front of you. 

What explains this growing student movement? Sometimes the correct answer is the one right in front of you. The students want an end to a war that has been executed with breathtaking violence and killed more than thirty-four thousand Palestinians, most of them women and children. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed or severely damaged. More than seventy-seven thousand people have been injured, and at least seventeen thousand children have been orphaned. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, while the United Nations reports that parts of Gaza are experiencing “full-blown famine” and continues to worry about the spread of disease as the weather warms.

More than anything, this generation has been schooled in the power of protest to pressure the political establishment to act on an issue that it would otherwise ignore. These young people have also come to reject the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that have undergirded two generations of U.S. wars, occupations, and interventions across the Middle East.  www.newyorker.com/news/essay/the-kids-are-not-all-right-they-want-to-be-heard 

'A battle scene': The brutality of police raids at Columbia University and CCNY | Middle East Eye Azad Essa 6 May 2024 

Evidence of police excesses emerges after university administrators ordered sweeps at anti-war encampments at two New York City campuses Testimony from several witnesses reveals that the New York Police Department assaulted a number of students and then blocked those injured students from accessing medical assistance at two New York university campuses where hundreds were holding Gaza solidarity encampments.  

At CCNY in West Harlem, students were sprayed with mace and pepper spray. Others were beaten with batons and were tackled to the ground. Student protesters suffered burns, broken bones, concussions and broken teeth. One medic, who asked not to be named, told Middle East Eye the police blocked them from offering assistance to the injured. www.middleeasteye.net/news/police-brutality-columbia-university-ccny-arrests-nypd-spg 

Columbia-Affiliated Union Theological Seminary Votes to Divest from Israel’s War on Gaza.  

Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, criticizes Columbia’s decision to arrest student protesters with a “police takeover” and “violent decampment,” in contrast to Union’s approach to student political expression. Dr. Jones continues “in terms of the decisions that we’ve made since the beginning of the war, but also increasingly since the beginning of the encampments and the student protests, is we have a long-standing policy of not allowing the police on our campus except in the case of a serious crime. And our campus, we consider it a sanctuary, a place of safety. And so, rather than responding with arrests, with penalizing students, we support protesters. We support students learning what it means to find their voice and speak out for justice and freedom.”  www.democracynow.org/2024/5/14/serene_jones_union_theological_seminary  

Notwithstanding the smears about protesting students that include their supposed ignorance about the “complicated history in the Middle East, Biden shows the fundamental indeed foundational ignorance and prejudice that informs US policy.

Fact-checking Biden: The myth of ‘ancient hatred for Jews’ in the Middle East debunked – Middle East Eye  www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240514-fact-checking-biden-the-myth-of-ancient-hatred-for-jews-in-the-middle-east-debunked/

Israel and AIPAC promote US legislation that expands antisemitism definition to include statements critical of Israel and statements advocating for Palestinian liberation.

US lawmakers vote to smear Palestinians as anti-Semitic | The Electronic Intifada 10 May 2024 https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/us-lawmakers-vote-smear-palestinians-anti-semitic 

Criticizing Israel? Nonprofits Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status Without Due Process  https://theintercept.com/2024/05/10/terrorism-bill-nonprofit-journalists-israel-hamas/