State department official’s resignation highlights rifts over US Gaza policy

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Written by Julian Borger | The Guardian Julian Borger | The Guardian

Published: 28 March 2024 28 March 2024

A human rights official has resigned from the US state department over Gazasaying the Biden administration is flouting US law by continuing to arm Israel, and is hushing up evidence that the US had seen on Israeli human rights abuses.

Annelle Sheline, said she had hoped to have an influence on policy by staying at her post in the Near Eastern section of the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, taking part in discussions, signing dissent cables and raising her concerns with her supervisor. But she had lost confidence she could do anything that would affect the flow of US arms to Israel.

“The fundamental reason was – I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,” Sheline told the Guardian. “I have a young daughter. She’s not yet two, but if some day in the future, she is learning about this and knows that I was at the state department and she asked me [about it] – I want to be able to tell her that I did what I could.”

Sheline is only the second state department official to resign over US policy on the Gaza war (another official left the education department over the issue), but she said that many of her colleagues had told her they would resign if they could afford to lose their job, and had urged her to speak out about her reasons for quitting, rather than to leave quietly.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/27/state-department-resignation-gaza-biden-policy

Message from Craig Corrie Marking 21 Years

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Written by Craig Corrie Craig Corrie

Published: 17 March 2024 17 March 2024

From Craig Corrie - 21 Years Later

Gaza Crushed With Our Tax Dollars

On March 16, 2003, our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed as she stood to protect the home of a Palestinian family in Rafah in Gaza. Rachel was crushed to death by the Israeli military under a militarized, Caterpillar, Inc. D9R bulldozer, supplied by our United States government, paid for by our tax dollars. Now, twenty-one years later, we are witnessing the entire Gaza population being crushed by the Israeli military, using planes, bombs, shells, tanks and, yes, even bulldozers supplied by the United States. Genocide. Paid for by our tax dollars.

In some ways you could see this coming: soldiers never held accountable for their war crimes, human rights violations by the army of a country feeling entitled to the land of another people. We know this story, and we have seen this genocide. Ask any native American.

Our family worked for almost two decades to secure accountability in Rachel’s case, first through diplomatic means, and when that failed, through a civil lawsuit in Israeli courts. Some of the court testimony is particularly telling. An IDF Colonel responsible for training stated that there are no civilians in war zones, and the officer responsible for the military police investigation into Rachel’s killing testified that he thought Israel was at war with everyone in Gaza, including the peace activists. And all the time, the Israeli defense team referred to the people of Gaza – Rachel’s friends, our friends – as “the terrorists.” Even the Israeli high court said that international law did not apply to the actions of Israel in Gaza. How telling.

Repeatedly, the U.S. supplies weapons to Israel that are used in ways giving probable cause of human rights violations. But when the U.S. asks for investigation, Israel replies with reports that are far from the result of the thorough, credible, and transparent investigation required of, or in Rachel’s case promised by, Israel. Citing that violations cannot be proven, the U.S. continues military aid – rather than withholding more funding until our questions are properly answered, as allowed by U.S. law and dictated by common sense. The U.S. routinely rewards IDF war crimes with increased military aid, rather than sanctions. When that aid is abetting genocide, as it has since October 7, 2023, the aid itself is a war crime.

Read more: Message from Craig Corrie Marking 21 Years

Biden’s passivity about mass death in Gaza is a moral stain on his presidency

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Written by Mohamad Bazzi Mohamad Bazzi

Published: 10 March 2024 10 March 2024

Apparently he can rush thousands of bombs to Israel, but can’t get Israel to unblock a US shipment of flour to Gazans

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As Biden continues supplying Israel with weapons, the US is culpable for the slaughter and catastrophe in Gaza. Even as UN and humanitarian officials sound the alarm about the risk of widespread famine, Israel continues to block large portions of the food and other aid mobilized by the international community from reaching Gaza. In the most blatant example of Biden’s inability or refusal to force Israeli officials to allow more aid, Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has blocked a large US shipment of flour from leaving the Israeli port of Ashdod for nearly a month. UN officials say the flour is enough to feed 1.1 million Gazans for a month.

Apparently, Biden can rush tens of thousands of bombs and missiles to Israel, but he can’t convince an Israeli minister to release a shipment of US flour – one which Netanyahu promised to facilitate during a call with Biden on 19 January. It’s the latest example of how Netanyahu and his hardline government have consistently humiliated Biden since the start of the Gaza war.

 Read more on The Guardian

The Truth will set you free

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Written by Jonathan Kuttab, Executive Director, Friends of Sabeel - North America Jonathan Kuttab, Executive Director, Friends of Sabeel - North America

Published: 08 March 2024 08 March 2024

The horrifying Flour Massacre last week, whereby Israeli tanks fired at a group of starving Palestinians crowded around a truck carrying sacks of flower and food supplies, killing over 100 Palestinians and wounding over 700 others, must be laid straight at Israel’s door. According to international law, Israel is obligated to provide food and basic necessities for all those living under its military authority. Instead, we see them strictly control and impede such food supplies and then shoot at those who are desperate for them. I cannot imagine what justification could exist for such a massacre.

As soon as the event took place, however, Israeli apologists flooded the airwaves giving their versions of the event. They claimed that most of those killed were crushed in the stampede, and not by Israeli fire (which, they said, only killed about 10). They also claimed that the Israeli forces were there to facilitate and not impede humanitarian food supplies, to prevent their theft and looting by Hamas. They also claimed, without any proof, that UNRWA was unreliable to distribute the food supplies and that Israel was trying its best to facilitate the entry of humanitarian food supplies.

This brings me to the subject of this essay: How do we discover the truth when surrounded by so much lying and misinformation about this issue?

Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty in war. And, on the subject of Palestine/Israel, the mainstream corporate media in this country is openly pro-Israel, and the Palestinian perspective is usually either missing or distorted beyond recognition. Israeli officials and apologists are given ample time to offer their views, which are presented as facts. To arrive at the truth and be able to communicate it to others, we need to do some actual work. We must use critical thinking. These principles apply to all news materials, and they may be well known and even elementary to most of you, but bear with me as I suggest a few necessary steps for finding out the truth:

• Use a variety of sources. In this country most corporate media follow the same pro-Israeli narrative and uncritically report the version presented by the Israeli army as established fact. Social media is less easily controlled but requires greater effort to evaluate content for reliability and truthfulness. One needs to seek additional sources through the internet, such as Al Jazeera, Al Mayadeen (Lebanese), TRT (Turkish), the BBC (British), and others which can provide valuable and differing perspectives.
• Always be conscious of the bias of any source to which we are listening. Be particularly skeptical when the source is an official government spokesperson, for Hamas, for the US State Department, for Israel, or for any other official body whose spokesperson is tasked with presenting the official line. Be particularly wary of their self-serving statements.
• Be mindful of a source’s track record. In evaluating the credibility of our sources, bear in mind not only their bias, but also their record of past lying, of changing their story, promising an investigation, quoting anonymous sources, etc.
• Similarly, bear in mind the accuracy and truthfulness of past reports. The Palestinian Ministry of Health, for example, has consistently provided accurate and reliable figures of casualties, supporting their figures with names, ages, and even ID Card numbers. The fact that they are affiliated with the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health” (because Hamas was the political party in power since 2007) does not degrade the ministry’s credibility or the professionalism of the healthcare workers involved in the cataloging process.
• Trust primary accounts over secondary sources. Give more weight to eyewitness accounts citing actual details, rather than second-hand reports or conclusions reached by reporters.
• Seek verification. Look for corroboration from other sources, where possible, and do not rely on only one source.
• Seek and give weight to reports by neutral bodies, international agencies, human rights and relief organizations, than to reports by government officials. These organizations, by definition, carry out humanitarian work and are usually politically neutral. Reports by UNRWA, Medicines San Frontiers (Doctors without Borders), Human Rights Watch, UNHCR, Amnesty International, and others should carry more weight than either official Palestinian or Israeli sources.
• Be skeptical of governments that restrict or deny access to foreign journalists. This is as true of the Assad Regime in Syria as it is of the Israeli Army in Gaza.
• Also, remember to be more vigilant in a context where an Army routinely targets, imprisons, or kills journalists. Israel has killed over 100 local journalists in Gaza in the past four months, sometimes targeting their homes and killing their family members as well.
• In listening to official representatives, look for “admissions against interest” and pay attention to what is not being said, or denied, as well as what is actually being said. For example, in cases where civilians are killed, note if the official reports fail to mention any weapons found, which generally would indicate that they have killed unarmed civilians.
• Bear in mind the broader context for every story you hear. News items usually focus on a snapshot of an event. Longer magazine articles may give more context, but usually the reader/viewer is left to their own devices to gain an understanding of the broader context.

For example, to understand last week’s tragedy, we must note that the desperate mobbing of the convoy carrying sacks of flour is the direct result of a deliberate policy of starvation. Israel has prevented the entry of sufficient food, particularly to the North of Gaza; UN agencies have declared that Israeli attacks on previous convoys made it unsafe for international aid agencies to travel in the Northern part of Gaza, under the full and total control of Israel. Also, we note from the heavily edited drone footage released by Israel that it is inconceivable that a stampede could result in hundreds dead and injured in an open field; Israelis “safeguarding” the supplies were inside tanks and could hardly be threatened by unarmed civilians attempting to escape the gunfire. We should also remember that Israel has not allowed foreign reporters into Northern Gaza and that doctors and hospital staff have stated that the overwhelming majority of the wounded had bullet or shrapnel wounds but not the asphyxiation associated with being trampled in a stampede.

President Biden claimed that there are multiple explanations for what occurred and that an independent investigation is required to determine the truth. Such an investigation would be welcome, of course, but it cannot be undertaken just by the Israelis. In the meantime, with a little critical thinking we can figure out essentially what happened, and it is truly ugly.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kuttab

Executive Director, FOSNA