Tag: Middle East Eye

Posted on

How international aid has normalised Israel’s 15-year siege of Gaza by Ismail Patel

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

Over the past 15 years, the international community has donated $ 5.7bn to provide relief for Palestinians in Gaza. These humanitarian relief efforts have saved the Palestinians in Gaza from genocide. However, the international humanitarian aid has unwittingly become a means for Israel to continue with the siege and normalise it…

..In 2012, it was revealed that Israel had calculated to allow, based on a person’s average requirement, 2,300 calories a day to enter Gaza. This was just sufficient enough “not to make them die of hunger,” as Weisglass stated.. foreign aid helps Israel as an occupier deflect its responsibilities under international law, the Hague Convention and the Fourth Geneva Convention to protect the Palestinian population and its property. Israel avoids its duty because humanitarian aid is preventing Palestinians from dying of hunger.

Israel’s neo-colonial blockade has ensured that, for every dollar the international community sends to Gaza, Israel enforces damage of over two dollars. The Israeli siege policy thus creates a perpetual deficit, leaving the people of Gaza in a state of permanent humanitarian crisis. 

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-international-aid-siege-normalised

Posted on

Israel’s Bennett urges citizens to carry guns, says ‘this is the time’ on Middle East Eye

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Bennett said in a video statement from his home on Wednesday where he is quarantined after testing positive for Covid-19. “What is expected of you, Israeli citizens? Vigilance and responsibility. Whoever has a gun licence, this is the time to carry a gun. We are also currently evaluating a larger framework to involve civilian volunteers who want to help and be of assistance.”

… Meanwhile, requests for arms purchases by Israeli citizens have been on the rise… According to data from the ministry of public security, requests increased three and a half times from the same period last year… More than a thousand gun purchase applications have been submitted since the beginning of March, and the number of applications has doubled in the past two weeks. 

… Late on Tuesday, Uzi Dayan, a former Israeli army general and member of Israel’s parliament, warned the Palestinians of another Nakba. “The thing we need to tell the Arab community, even those who didn’t participate in the attacks, is to be careful,” he said. “If we reach a civil war situation, things will end in one word and a situation you know, which is Nakba,” he added. “This is what will happen in the end.” 

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-bennett-calls-citizens-carry-guns-saying-time-do-so

Posted on

Israel: Knesset member calls for murder of people in mixed marriages on Middle East Eye

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

David Sheen, an Israeli journalist, who wrote about Pindrus’s remarks on Twitter and shared his speech, said: “Like most eliminationist lawmakers, Yitzhak Pindrus doesn’t have a Twitter account, but apparently he has a private account, because he immediately noted that his incitement to genocide all Israelis ‘who contribute to miscegenation’ was reported on that.”

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-knesset-member-pindrus-calls-murder-mixed-marriages

Posted on

NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang blasted for comparing BDS to ‘fascist boycotts’ by Sheren Khalel

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Abukar Arman, a political analyst and former diplomat, said Yang’s stance was “a stupid moral equivalence”. Arman said that the BDS movement, which has grown increasingly popular on college campuses over the years, “is the only mechanism available to people of conscience to hold [the] last apartheid regime in the world” accountable for its 70 years of “systematic genocide”. 

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/andrew-yang-nyc-mayoral-candidate-bds

Posted on

Morocco’s Islamist backing for Israel normalisation is a game changer by Khalil al-Anani

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Before he became the head of government, Othmani railed against the establishment of normal relations with Israel in the absence of Palestinian rights, writing an article entitled “Normalization Is a Civilizational Genocide” that was strongly critical of Egypt’s and Jordan’s normalisation of relations with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively.

Othmani’s signature on the normalisation deal with Israel is thus unprecedented, marking the first time that the head of an Islamic party has signed such an agreement – and calling into question the credibility of Islamists with regards to the Palestinian cause.

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/morocco-israel-normalisation-islamists-could-face-major-repercussions

Posted on

What is the Sabra and Shatila massacre? by Sofia Aboudari

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

38 years ago, Lebanese Phalangist militia stormed the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, killing an estimated 800-3500 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, as Israel’s army watched on.

The massacre has been laballed an ‘act of genocide’ by the UN commission

Continue watching at https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/what-sabra-and-shatila-massacre

Posted on

Israel and El Salvador: Love in a time of genocide by Belen Fernandez

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Despite a sizeable Palestinian presence, this tiny Central American country continues to be seduced by a tiny genocidal country on the other side of the world… A recent Al Jazeera video reminds us that, from 1975 to 1979 – the runup to the 12-year Salvadoran civil war – “83 percent of El Salvador’s military imports came from Israel”. Furthermore, Israelis “helped train ANSESAL, the secret police that would lay the foundation for death squads” during the war – during which at least 75,000 people perished. The vast majority of lethal violence was committed by the state and allied paramilitary groups and death squads. In its report titled “Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression,” the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network documents how Israel not only provided weapons and counterinsurgency training to the maniacal Salvadoran right-wing, but also “helped plan and implement ‘scorched earth’ policies”. 

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-and-el-salvador-love-time-genocide

Posted on

Gaza 2020: How easy it is for the world to delete Palestinian pain by David Hearst

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

This is Gaza now: a brutal siege of a forgotten people subsisting in conditions predicted to be unlivable by the UN in 2020, a year that is just a few weeks away… As Israeli writer Meron Rapoport has said, Israel’s leaders have long harboured genocidal thoughts about what to do with the enclave that they chased all those refugees into after 1948.
In 1967, former Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol set up a unit to encourage Palestinians to emigrate. “Precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip… Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither,” he suggested, according to declassified minutes of cabinet meetings released in 2017.

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-2020-un-report-history-forgotten-israel-blockade

Posted on

Gaza 2020: Has the Palestinian territory reached the point of no return? by Megan O’Toole

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

In 2012, a United Nations report painted a bleak picture of the Gaza Strip and the conditions facing its Palestinian inhabitants.

…It is now almost 2020. The UN’s projections about Gaza’s ballooning demands have proven largely accurate – but the delivery of essential services has failed to catch up.

…Michael Lynk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told MEE: “The prediction of unliveability has already arrived. The common measuring stick used by the UN or any other international organisation to be able to evaluate how people live is human dignity, and Gaza has been without human dignity for years now.”

…Haidar Eid, an associate professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, described Israel’s policy towards Palestinians in the enclave as “genocidal”. 

…with the continuing population growth, service reduction and soaring unemployment, Gaza may be approaching a point of no return. Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, told MEE: “The term ‘unliveable’… is meant as an alarm bell for the international community, but that bell has been ringing for a long time.” The warning, she said, has been ignored amid international indifference and humanitarian interventions that merely serve as a substitute for human rights. “Without the unencumbered movement of people and goods,” Roy said, “Gaza will be condemned to continued ruination.” 

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/what-is-gaza-2020-un-report-uninhabitable-unliveable-blockade

Posted on

#Normalisation Is Treason: Why artists must side with oppressed Palestinians by Nada Elia

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Mansour’s appearance in Jerusalem, and the screening of her feature film there, are all part of culture-washing Israel’s encroachment on the human rights of an entire people, whose women, children and men have no country whatsoever, and are made refugees in their own land, while Mansour enjoys the privileges of a cosmopolitan life.  
So long as there are boundaries placed by Israel on an oppressed people – in the form of apartheid, occupation, the denial of the right of return, and a siege bordering on genocide in Gaza – then artists must side with the oppressed, or their art will be used to bolster the oppressor.   

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/normalisationistreason-why-artists-must-side-oppressed-palestinians