JoBo

These periodic episodes of killing and destruction, which Israeli commentators and politicians cynically call “mowing the lawn,” have been a price Israel was willing to pay to avoid being pushed toward a two-state solution. We chose to “manage” the conflict through a combination of brute force and economic incentives, instead of working to solve it by ending our perpetual occupation of Palestinian territory.

Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.

For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence. It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, has argued for years that Palestinian terror can be defeated only by creating Palestinian hope.

Personally, I defend a politics of non-violence, in the knowledge that it cannot possibly operate as an absolute principle to be applied on all occasions. I maintain that liberation struggles that practise non-violence help to create the non-violent world in which we all want to live. I deplore the violence unequivocally at the same time as I, like so many others, want to be part of imagining and struggling for true equality and justice in the region, the kind that would compel groups like Hamas to disappear, the occupation to end, and new forms of political freedom and justice to flourish. Without equality and justice, without an end to the state violence conducted by a state, Israel, that was itself founded in violence, no future can be imagined, no future of true peace – not, that is, ‘peace’ as a euphemism for normalisation, which means keeping structures of inequality, rightlessness and racism in place. But such a future cannot come about without remaining free to name, describe and oppose all the violence, including Israeli state violence in all its forms, and to do so without fear of censorship, criminalisation, or of being maliciously accused of antisemitism. The world I want is one that would oppose the normalisation of colonial rule and support Palestinian self-determination and freedom, a world that would, in fact, realise the deepest desires of all the inhabitants of those lands to live together in freedom, non-violence, equality and justice. This hope no doubt seems naive, even impossible, to many. Nevertheless, some of us must rather wildly hold to it, refusing to believe that the structures that now exist will exist for ever. For this, we need our poets and our dreamers, the untamed fools, the kind who know how to organise.

October 10, 2023

CUNY LAW JLSA STATEMENT ON EVENTS IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE

In this season of renewal and self-reflection, and as we begin the year 5784, the Jewish students at the CUNY School of Law wish to express our uncompromising solidarity with the Palestinian people in their righteous struggle for self-determination. This feeling is accompanied by a profound sense of grief over the lives that have been lost. We are steadfast in our belief that Zionism – as a political ideology predicated on theft and destruction – serves to imperil both Jews and Palestinians, even though its proponents only target the latter.

In his analysis of the global anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon wrote, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Such is the case for the Palestinian people, who have, for generations, been made to suffocate under the deadly weight of the Zionist project. This settler-colonial enterprise, promoted by antisemites within the British Empire following World War I, has taken shape across decades of uninterrupted brutality. In 1948, Zionist militias unleashed a campaign of terror marked by mass murder and systematic sexual violence, razing over 500 Palestinian villages and forcing more than 750 thousand Palestinians off their native lands.

Today, nearly 6 million Palestinians are classified as refugees by the United Nations, 1.5 million of whom are crowded into refugee camps in Occupied Palestine and in neighboring countries. In the West Bank, the constant proliferation of illegal settlements has advanced a regime of apartheid, wherein Jewish settlers are afforded political and economic rights while Palestinians are subjected to constant surveillance, harassment, violence and intimidation.

Meanwhile, Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants are frequently deprived of even the most basic of services, such as electricity and clean water, since Israel exercises almost complete control over the territory’s borders and economy. In light of these facts, international human rights organizations have repeatedly called Gaza “the world’s largest open-air prison.” In recent days, Israeli fighter jets – many of which are American-made – have indiscriminately bombed Gaza, leveling entire neighborhoods and murdering hundreds of men, women and children.

We recognize, therefore, that the Palestinian people are resisting the inherently cruel Zionist project and are facing down the most powerful countries in the world in doing so. Although international law states that all peoples have a right to self-determination, the international community has only served to aid Israel in depriving Palestinians of this right. Western-backed diplomatic efforts such as the Oslo Accords have proven to be little more than farcical propaganda campaigns, and institutions like the UN have consistently demonstrated an unwillingness and/or inability to hold Israel accountable over its blatant disregard for international law.

While Israel is given free reign to massacre protesters, as it did during the 2018 Great March of Return, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign – which aims to disrupt the financial machinery of the occupation – has been smeared as “anti-semitic” by western politicians and media. In line with these bad-faith attacks, 37 states and several European countries have enacted anti-BDS policies. These realities all contribute to the profoundly desperate situation in Occupied Palestine.

Since no form of Palestinian resistance is ever justified in the eyes of Zionists, it is no surprise that CUNY’s administration has once again chosen to malign student-organizers who are demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation. A few short months ago, the Board of Trustees defamed CUNY Law’s commencement speaker as a proponent of “hate speech”, simply because she identified white supremacy and capitalist extraction as foundational elements of all settler-colonial projects – including Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and systematic police terror against Black and brown communities in the United States.

It is clear, therefore, that the CUNY administration does not speak for its student population, which is largely composed of working class New Yorkers and people of color. As Jewish students of a school that claims the motto “law in the service of human needs”, we will continue to pursue tikkun olam – the repairing of the world. This necessarily includes our unwavering support for the Palestinian people in their decades-long resistance against Zionist brutality, as well as for our classmates who are courageously advancing that struggle.

In solidarity,

CUNY Jewish Law Students Association

More conspiracy nutjobbing from the Tories.

As I write these words, I am sitting at home in Tel Aviv, trying to figure out how to protect my family in a house with no shelter or safe room, following with growing panic the reports and rumors of horrible events taking place in the Israeli towns near Gaza which are under attack. I see people, some of them my friends, calling on social media to attack Gaza more fiercely than ever before. Some Israelis are saying that now is the time to eradicate Gaza entirely — essentially calling for genocide. Through all the explosions, the dread and the bloodshed, speaking about peaceful solutions seems like madness to them.

Yet I remember that everything that I am feeling now, which every Israeli must be sharing, has been the life experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long. The only solution, as it has always been, is to bring an end of apartheid, occupation, and siege, and promote a future based on justice and equality for all of us. It is not in spite of the horror that we have to change course — it is exactly because of it.

Single people’s invisibility is part of a larger, longer shift in politics towards proving that government is only there for people who deserve support. Families are more deserving than singles, and “working people” are more deserving than people who aren’t in work, cannot work due to disability or illness, or do care work that is unrecognised and unpaid. It was back in 2005 that the BBC noted the ubiquity of the phrase “hard-working families” in New Labour rhetoric, and so it is no surprise that it has been revived in the current party’s tribute act to that era. “It has always been a Tory message,” the Times columnist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris told the BBC at the time. “It is nothing new from the Tories, but both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair want to rid the Labour party of this association with handouts to people. It chimes in very well with New Labour, this idea of no free rides and no feather-bedding.”

The PSA said it had "very strict rules" for connection services, and enforcement action is taken if providers break these rules.

It also said it would cap all call costs at £40 from 18 September.

Fear the regulator! Only £40 for a call that should be free!

Here's the other sort of PSA (from the link):

How to spot a call connection service:

• Official numbers usually begin 01, 02, 03 or 0800

• If the number beings 09, 087 or 084, it is likely to be a connection service and will cost more

• When searching for a number on a search engine, be aware that the first number may not be the one you are looking for

• Look out for paid-for ads - these may be connection services.

Reasonably speedy retraction this time, six months from when the problems were first noted on PubPeer (https://pubpeer.com/publications/58E5F4120AB02E9565E3B4DE303EC3). Nine years after publication...

Elisabeth Bik is doing an incredible job. Her toot for this retraction: https://med-mastodon.com/@ElisabethBik/110969401224111581

"In their letter to the Home Office, lawyers for the FBU cited media reports which said the Bibby Stockholm had only 222 single-occupancy rooms, but that additional beds had been placed in each in order to to increase the capacity to 506.

"Other reports said that, while the barge had three fire exits, one was not operational because it was at the end of a gangway that had been deemed too steep to be safely used.

"A whistleblower in the local authority is also quoted as telling the Times that fire checks in July had led to serious safety concerns and describing the barge as having the potential to become a "floating Grenfell"."