Jew World Order

“It is Outrageous That New York State Actively Shelters, Promotes and Celebrates Such Violence”

No doubt you remember that viral video of American settler Yaakov Fauci telling Muna El Kurd, “If I don’t steal your house, someone else will.”

This week Al-Awda New York: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, the National Lawyers Guild, and other activists held an action outside Fauci’s house in East Meadow, Long Island before marching to the Brooklyn office of Attorney General Letitia James to demand action against domestic organizations that help fund Israeli settlement expansion.

“The U.N. Human Rights Commission Rapporteur recently decried settlements as war crimes, and New York private and government actors are actively abetting war crimes, violence and genocide in Palestine with wholesale impunity. This must end if Palestine and the region can ever see peace,” said attorney Audrey Bomse, a member of Al-Awda New York and the National Lawyers Guild, in a statement.

“It is a violation of U.S. federal law for Americans to engage in war crimes and genocide, it is shocking that there is impunity for such open acts of violence, and it is outrageous that New York State actively shelters, promotes and celebrates such violence, which is itself also a crime,” said attorney Lamis Deek.

The recent Ben & Jerry’s decision was also referenced during the action. “It’s appalling that government officials like DeBlasio are denouncing an ice cream company for partially withdrawing from Israeli-invaded lands while sheltering war criminal organizations right here in New York,” declared Daniel Teehan, a member of Al-Awda New York. “…This will be the first of many actions to demand the closure and prosecution of Israeli apartheid and war crime perpetrators. New Yorkers want our taxes to be used to support our communities here instead of being used to destroy communities and commit high crimes in Palestine.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urging the Biden administration to end tax-exempt status for nonprofits that fund illegal Israeli settlements. It was signed by Representatives Cori Bush (D-MO), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Andre Carson (D-IN), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Betty McCollum (D-MN).

“We write to express our extreme concern that U.S. charities are funding and providing direct support to Israeli organizations that are working to expand and perpetuate Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in violation of international law, including supporting the dispossession and forced displacement of Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem neighborhoods,” begins the letter. “We are concerned that these policies violate U.S. obligations under international law, as well as federal tax law.”

Pro-Israel Groups Continue to Melt Down

In last week’s newsletter we covered some of the unhinged reactions that the Ben & Jerry’s announcement generated among lawmakers in Israel and the United States. This week pro-Israel organizations really upped the ante.

The Israeli-American Council flew a banner over Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont that read, “Serve Ice Cream, Not Hate” and the hashtag #BDSisHATE.

Not to be outdone, the Shurat HaDin Law Center in Tel Aviv say they’re going to distribute ice cream in the West Bank under the name “Judea and Samaria’s Ben & Jerry’s.” The organization’s president Nitsana Darshan-Leitner sent a letter to Unilever claiming “We will now become the lawful owners of the Ben & Jerry’s name in Judea and Samaria.”

“In order to maintain trademark protection against others utilizing your name there must be a bona fide intent to conduct business in a specific region,” it reads. “You have publicly declared that your intent is to sever ties with this specific area evidencing the exact opposite of a bona fide intent to continue.”

“As such, Unilever’s announced boycott of what you call ‘Occupied Palestine,’ but which we understand is ‘a euphemism for areas where Jews live,’ means that Ben & Jerry’s abandoned trademark protections in that territory,” it continues. “We are confident we can expand the business into each and every community in the territory you have abandoned.”

Good luck with that.

Block the Boat Hits New Jersey

We’ve covered “Block the Boat” actions on the website many times. Those protests target the Haifa-based shipping company ZIM and aim to prevent their cargo ships from offloading.

After Bay Area activists successfully blocked ZIM from offloading in Oakland last month, I spoke with Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) executive director Lara Kiswani about the efforts. She explained ZIM’s connection to Israeli apartheid:

ZIM was actually an instrument used in the settler colonial project of the state of Israel. It brought over European settlers to Palestine in 1948. It also historically has exported weaponry from the state of Israel to various parts of the global south, but also to the United States. And in 2014, when we were blockading the ship, the same shipping line was bringing weaponry to ports across the United States to be used against black and brown communities.

This week I spoke with activists Tova Fry and Suzanne Adely about “Block the Boat” protests that recently took place at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Here’s a portion of that interview:

Mondoweiss: You had mentioned that the first pro-Palestine action at a port there occurred last month, in solidarity with the Block the Boat action in Oakland. I wanted to start there. Can you talk about that action, what the scene was like, and how it went?

Tova Fry: The Port of New York and New Jersey is seven container ports. This is the first time, as far as we know, that the Palestine action has happened at the ports. So we knew we had a lot of work to do because nobody had any contacts with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). We had only about a week or a week and a half to organize the event.

So we were trying to make contact with the union and finally get support from the union, but also just figure out all the logistics of the action itself. And so, Suzanne and I actually developed a flier to hand out to the longshore people to try to help them understand what we were doing and what we were asking of them. And Suzanne and I went to the port, to the terminal where the employee entrance was a few days before the event to try to flier the workers.

There’s a drive-in entry here which is than the situation in Oakland, where there’s a union hiring hall where you can flier them. So anyway, we were there to try hand out fliers. We had only handed out seven fliers when we were accosted by the terminal’s private security guards. They claimed that we were on private property, so we moved from the curb area we were standing on to the actual street.

We tried to flier there and they told us the whole street was private property and that the cops were on the way. They also claimed that they knew we were coming and that they had alerted Homeland Security. So we decided that rather than resist arrest, we’d go back to our cars. By the time I was pulling out, there were about ten police cars, there was the port’s private security. I noticed they had blocked Suzanne from leaving so I stopped.

Suzanne Adely: At that point we were asking the police whether we were free to leave. Some of them said we had to speak to their Captain and then there were others who used that opportunity to say, “We know what you’re up to. We’ve seen posts about what’s going on and we want to let you know that we’re watching what you’re doing.” They were even dropping reference to Homeland Security and counterterrorism agents, just as a way to try and intimidate us. And then there were others that said, “We’ll let you go. We just we just need to ask you a few more questions and we’d like to see your identification.” They took down our license plate numbers and scanned our IDs.

It was just sort of this very direct and obvious attempt to stop us from reaching out to the workers and just kind of trying to intimidate us from having any kind of action or activity at the port.

Going into that action, we knew that we had to be cautious in terms of our choices, because we we had very specific goals to be able to mobilize a picket in front of the port’s gates. But we also knew that there could be a high risk of repression. We always have seasoned activists with us, but we also we also often have community-based folks. We knew that, as Tova explained, we were dealing with private security, Port Authority police, and New Jersey police

We were also aware that there was a federal building in the vicinity, so we didn’t know if there was the potential to come into direct conflict with any federal agents. So we were very cautious going in. I terms of it being the first such action in the area, I think we viewed it as highly successful. We were able to mobilize a really good amount of people to come out to a place that was very hard to reach, that was very isolated at 6:00 in the morning, and we were able to mobilize enough numbers that we sort of quickly were able to defy police demands and march to the front of the gates blocking the entrance.

You can read my entire interview with Tova and Suzanne on our website tomorrow.

Odds & Ends

💰 Ohio congressional candidate Shontel Brown faces a possible ethics probe over an April article from The Intercept on contract awards. As a County Councilmember, Brown voted to give millions in contracts to companies connected to her partner and her campaign donors. From Newsweek: “Under Ohio law, public officials are prohibited from knowingly authorizing or using their authority or influence ‘to secure authorization of any public contract in which the public official, a member of the public official’s family, or any of the public official’s business associates has an interest.’ Violation of the statute is a felony, and penalties can include prison time.”

💸 The Anti-Defamation League is teaming up with PayPal to “fight extremism and hate.” Chip Gibbons on Twitter: “This is horrifying given the ADL’s history of trying to censor Palestinian organizing and just generally propagandizing on behalf of an apartheid regime, but also the logical outcome of counter extremism efforts, which some on the US ‘left’ have recently been tacitly endorsing.”

You can read about recent activism targeting the ADL at our website.

🍦 I spoke with Wafic Faour, member of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine (VTJP) and lifelong Palestine activist, about the group’s (decade-plus) Ben & Jerry’s campaign and the company’s recent decision:

Sometimes when you talk to people about this issue they think it’s just something that’s happening far away. They don’t relate to it. So you open the subject and you talk to people about it, about how it’s against international law to benefit from profit from the occupation. It’s been an educational movement because we talk to people about Palestine, Palestinian lives, Palestinian land, Palestinian water, Palestinian environment while we are doing the campaign. We use the company as an education tool.

Even though we did all this work, a lot of people saw this all as a far-fetched goal to get them out of there because we are a small group in Vermont. A lot of us are middle-aged people and we use the old technique of leafleting. However after the May war on Gaza, and so many children being killed, a younger generation seemed to join us. They know technology, Instagram, Twitter. They took it up to another level where it had a real effect.

🇺🇸 The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to boost The Pentagon budget by $25 billion.

🍦 The Chair of Ben & Jerry’s Board Anuradha Mittal tweeted, “I am proud of Ben & Jerry’s for taking a stance to end sale of its ice cream in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This action is not anti-Semitic. I am not anti-Semitic. The vile hate that has been thrown at me does it intimidate me. Pls work for peace – not hatred!”

🍦 Ben & Jerry’s founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield wrote an op-ed for the New York Times announcing that they support their former company’s decision:

While we no longer have any operational control of the company we founded in 1978, we’re proud of its action and believe it is on the right side of history. In our view, ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history. It was especially brave of the company. Even though it undoubtedly knew that the response would be swift and powerful, Ben & Jerry’s took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values.

That we support the company’s decision is not a contradiction nor is it anti-Semitic. In fact, we believe this act can and should be seen as advancing the concepts of justice and human rights, core tenets of Judaism.

🇮🇶 The United States isn’t leaving Iraq, its occupation is simply being rebranded.  2,500 American service members are sticking around for “training and advisory” purposes. Good piece on this in Responsible Statecraft from Annelle Sheline:

Announcing a troop withdrawal when no troops are in fact to be withdrawn reinforces a broader alarming trend in the forever wars — finding ways to keep American soldiers perpetually deployed, despite the public’s desire for the United States to prioritize investment at home over violence abroad.

⚖️ Zoë Carpenter has a piece in The Nation about sexual assault in the military and the congressional push to finally pass reforms:

Many survivors blame the low rates of reporting and conviction on the way the military justice system handles assault and harassment. Decisions about whether to prosecute allegations of major crimes are made by commanding officers, who don’t have legal training and may be friendly with the accused—all of which, victims have said, leaves them vulnerable to retaliation and conflicts of interest within the system. For the past decade, victim advocates have been pushing to take prosecution decisions out of the chain of command and make them the responsibility of military prosecutors. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand sponsored legislation to do this in 2013, sparking a contentious debate. Gillibrand has reintroduced her bill several times since, but it’s never had enough support to pass a full floor vote in the Senate.

But that has changed now. As of June, Gillibrand’s bill—the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act—has more than 70 supporters, including Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran and assault survivor…

🇮🇱 Human Rights Watch investigated three Israeli strikes in May that killed 62 Palestinian civilians and found there were no evident military targets in the vicinity. “Israel’s partners, particularly the United States, which supplies significant military assistance and whose US-made weapons were used in at least two of the attacks investigated by Human Rights Watch, should condition future security assistance to Israel on it taking concrete and verifiable actions to improve its compliance with the laws of war and international human rights law, and to investigate past abuses,” reads the report.

🇾🇪 Biden has said he’ll end U.S. support for the war on Yemen but activists say congress must act to make sure that actually happens. “Organizers are up against an administration that has not been forthcoming about what it’s doing on the ground,” writes Sarah Lazare at In These Times. “The Biden administration’s February announcement was met with much fanfare. But public details on what constituted ​’offensive operations,’ and what exactly an end to the U.S. role would look like, were vague from the outset. The Biden administration has since avoided providing details about what American withdrawal looks like.”

🍦 The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Adalah Justice Project, and the Movement for Black Lives put out a statement on Ben & Jerry’s. Here’s part of it: “We welcome Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop sales in illegal Israeli Jewish-only settlements, and we call on Unilever to align with the Ben & Jerry’s board to end all business with apartheid Israel. Until then, the boycott continues.”

📰 Last week Bloomberg published an op-ed by Iran hawk Dennis Ross about how Israel should be given a GBU-57 bomb and a B-2 bomber to potentially drop it. As Eli Clifton points out at Responsible Statecraft, Bloomberg failed to divulge some crucial information to its readers:

Ross and Bloomberg neglected to disclose that the former diplomat may have a financial conflict of interest in advocating for the export of these specific weapons to destroy Iranian nuclear sites: Ross is a senior adviser at WestExec Advisers, a firm whose client list includes Boeing, the manufacturer of the GBU-57 bomb and the B-2 bomber.…

Bloomberg didn’t disclose that Ross may have another incentive to press for these seemingly extreme measures: money. Ross works as a senior adviser at WestExec, a firm that maintains exceptionally close ties to the Biden White House. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was one of WestExec’s founders and the firm is largely staffed by national security officials from the Obama administration.

During the Trump years, WestExec signed up a client list of prominent companies, including Boeing.

🇮🇱 This week the House voted to approve $3.3 billion in security aid to Israel as part of the congressional appropriations process.

💻 We are currently fundraising for Mondoweiss. My colleague Yumna Patel recently detailed how your donations make her reporting possible at the site:

If you’ve been following Mondoweiss for some time, one thing you know is that in our coverage of Palestine we have always called Israeli oppression what it is: apartheid. And you also know that the most recent wave of protests against Israeli repression are not the first, nor will they be the last. I’m so proud that because of readers like you, I’m able to share with the world, in real time, what is really happening on the ground.

The stories in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah are not unique. All over Palestine, whether in Khirbet Humsah, Khan al-Ahmar, or in Beita, Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed from their lands. And everywhere they are resisting.

At Mondoweiss, we aren’t afraid to share Palestinian voices unapologetically. When other publications steer clear of calling out Israel for its crimes, even refusing to call it an occupation, we actually listen to Palestinians, and never mince words.

In this historic moment, I’m grateful to be doing my part. Will you join us to help continue to get these stories out to the world?

🙏 Solidarity to our friends and comrades at Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP). This week they reported that Israeli forces had shot and killed 11-year-old Mohammad Mo’ayyad Bahjat Abu Sara. Mohammad was murdered while sitting in the backseat of his father’s car, the 11th Palestinian child that Israel has killed in the occupied West Bank this year.

A day after the group reported this, their main office in Al-Bireh was raided by the Israeli military. They confiscated computers, laptops, and files concerning Palestinian child detainee clients. To say DCIP is invaluable is a vast understatement. We consistently rely on their courageous work and condemn any attempt to suppress it.

☀️ Oh! I’m on vacation next week but Phil will be pinch hitting.

Stay safe out there,

Michael

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