Issue #19 - How the West protects Israel's child-killing regime
HRW hypocrisy; New video shows Israeli killing of Palestinian child; and direct action gets the goods in the UK.
Here’s what I’ve been reading this week.
Firstly, you should check out this feature by my EI colleague Maureen Murphy, on the hypocrisy of Human Rights Watch and its anti-Palestinian agenda.
As always, Maureen writes with searing moral clarity and an urgency which is no less imperative for her wisdom and experience.
HRW recently published a report investigating Israeli crimes during their most recent war against the people of the Gaza Strip in May. As Maureen writes, although it is a useful piece of documentation in some ways, a terrible “both-sides-ism” inflicts the report.
The group is essentially protecting Israel, by refusing to call for an arms embargo or other targeted sanctions.
Two short extracts from Maureen’s piece:
Given the scope of the crimes it has documented, it is baffling why Human Rights Watch would not just call for an arms embargo on Israel. It has done so for other countries including Ethiopia, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.
In its Gaza report, Human Rights Watch does not call for targeted sanctions on Israel as it has in many of the aforementioned cases. However, the group also recently called for targeted sanctions against Lebanese authorities responsible for the Beirut port explosion last August that killed 218 people.
And:
It is unlikely that Human Rights Watch’s forthcoming report on rockets used by Palestinian groups will recommend that the US and EU arm Palestinians with precision weapons like they arm Israel.
It is also unlikely that Human Rights Watch will suggest that the “partners” of armed groups in Gaza condition “security assistance” on their compliance with international law as it does with Israel.
Read the whole piece, as usual over at The Electronic Intifada.
Last week I recommended you read several pieces another EI colleague, Tamara Nassar, about the Palestinian children who have most recently been brazenly murdered by Israeli army criminals.
Now new video confirms what Palestinian eyewitnesses were saying about one of those same children: 11-year-old Mohammad Abu Sara, shot dead by Israeli army thugs near Hebron recently, while sitting in the back of his father’s car.
Shocking images showed the dead boy’s blood staining the back seat of the car and even the bread that they had been trying to take home from their grocery shop.
Ali Abunimah explains:
Security camera footage released on Tuesday shows that Israeli occupation forces shot at the car of a Palestinian family with no conceivable justification on 28 July, killing 11-year-old Muhammad Abu Sara.
The boy was in the car with his father Muayyad Abu Sara, who was driving, and two younger siblings. They had been out shopping and were returning to their home in the occupied West Bank town of Beit Ummar near Hebron.
Read Ali’s full article and watch the new videos here.
Finally this week, I also recommend you read my colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman’s new piece about the Anti-Defamation League’s team-up with Silicon Valley monopolist PayPal:
PayPal is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League, a major Israel lobby group, to investigate how “extremist and hate movements” use financial tools to fundraise.
The partnership with PayPal is being managed through the ADL’s so-called Center on Extremism, which markets itself as “a leading authority on extremism, terrorism and hate.”
The nearest UK equivalent to the ADL is the Community Security Trust, or CST. Both the ADL and CST pose as essentially civil rights groups, protecting Jews against prejudice and the supposedly never-ending “new wave of anti-Semitism.”
But both groups are actually, in their primary functions, pro-Israel lobbies. As Nora explains:
The ADL regularly sends US police leaders on junkets to Israel for training in “intensive counter-terrorism” tactics.
In 2020, more than 100 leading civil rights and social justice groups around the US called on allied organizations to drop partnerships with the ADL.
The ADL was even caught red-handed by US authorities in the 1990s running a massive spy ring targeting normal US citizens who had been campaigning against Israeli and South African apartheid.
The ADL got off very lightly all told. Read more in Nora’s article, and in this classic piece by journalist Mark Ames (who was one of many left-wing victims of the ADL’s illegal spy ring).
My work this week
I wrote this piece about the first year of campaigning by activist group Palestine Action, focusing on this great new short film about it. They use direct action and have the laudable goal of removing Israeli arms maker Elbit’s presence from the UK.
Direct action is perhaps not for everyone. But at the same time, it requires no special qualifications, and only some basic legal and strategic knowledge — which Palestine Action helpfully provides on their website.
There’s no arguing with what Palestine Action has achieved in its first year. Despite what the group says was 70 actions against Elbit, including 20 high profile factory and office occupations (including sabotage and graffiti) not a single case against its activists has yet been brought to trial by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Elbit is running scared. It knows that should this come to court, the activists will argue lawful excuse for their actions. They will prove how Elbit is involved in Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.
The firm does not want to go to court.
But it — and the Israeli and British governments — certainly want Palestine Action shut down.
Read more in my article, and watch the short film above.
Here’s this week’s MEMO column by myself: about the most recent Congressional primary race for the Democrats in the US and how Israel lobby cash managed to help defeat a popular, progressive, pro-Bernie Sanders candidate, Nina Turner.
Reminder that we’re still being told by some supposed “leftists” that to even use the most correct and accurate phrase “Israel lobby” is “anti-Semitic.” Turner’s defeat is yet more proof how much hogwash that is.
