Lynch has seen a memo entitled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” which was produced by food security experts in US AID and the State Department, and which they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These US officials gave the memo a subheading that is damning for the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery” of food.

So two things are being asserted:

1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.

2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.

That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.

Lynch quotes the memo, sent earlier this month:

“Adequate health, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene … interventions, an immediate cessation of hostilities, and sustained humanitarian access will be required. Absent these conditions, all available evidence indicates rising acute food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease will lead to a rapid increase in non-trauma deaths, particularly among women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.”

It continues that the

“deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).”

The National Institutes of Health concluded that “During 2010–2012, extreme food insecurity and famine in Somalia were estimated to account for 256,000 deaths.” The population of the country was then about 12 million, so that is 2.1% dead of starvation. If Gaza’s coming famine were only as bad as Somalia’s we’d expect 46,200 dead from starvation alone, more than have been killed by Israeli bombing during the past six months. But the USAID and State Department experts are saying that the Gaza famine is outpacing Somalia’s. Hence we can expect even more deaths from this cause.

The USAID/ State memo is consistent with what the World Food Program is assessing as of last Wednesday. According to UN News, Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director, Geneva office, said at a news conference on Wednesday of Gaza, “people are clearly dying of hunger.” So this catastrophe is not in the future. It is now.

Cirri said, “People cannot meet even the most basic food needs, they have exhausted all coping strategies, like eating animal fodder, begging, selling off their belongings to buy food. They are most of the time destitute and clearly some of them are dying of hunger.”

He called for massive food deliveries “in a very short time.” He said,

“We’ve mentioned the necessity to rebuild livelihoods, to address root causes and so on. But, in the immediate time, like tomorrow, we really need to significantly increase our food supplies. This means rolling out massive and consistent food assistance in conditions that allow humanitarian staff and supplies to move freely and (for) affected people to access safely the assistance.”

Food security experts, Cirri remarked, say that “We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation. Malnutrition among children is spreading. We estimate 30 per cent of children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or wasted and 70 per cent of the population in the north is facing catastrophic hunger,”

Cirr added “There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks.”

Reuters Video: “Gaza Strip could reach famine in six weeks, WFP says | REUTERS”

Lynch at Devex also has seen a study produced by USAID concluding that Israel is in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and is impeding the delivery of US-funded humanitarian aid. It is therefore ineligible for US provision of offensive weaponry.

On February 8, President Joe Biden had issued a national security memo instructing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to seek written assurances from all recipients of such US military weaponry that they are abiding by IHL and not interfering with humanitarian aid shipments. Either the Israeli government has declined to proffer such assurances, or USAID has concluded that they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

The paper concluded that the killing of (at that time) over 32,000 persons by Israel, of which the US government assesses two-thirds or 21,120, were noncombatant women and children, could constitute a violation of International Humanitarian Law. The official death toll reported by the UN, based on Gaza Ministry of Health Statistics, has risen to over 34,000, but this number is widely considered to be a gross under-count, given that thousands of people were killed when Israeli fighter jets targeted their apartment buildings, and their bodies are under rubble, unrecovered. Many likely died a slow, agonizing death, trapped by fallen concrete blocks, thirsting to death. After 3 days without water, renal failure typically sets in. Some observers estimate that the real death toll may be 100,000, or 4.5% of the pre-war population. That is about the percentage of the non-Russian European population killed by Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (17 million out of about 400 million).

Although Israel claims to have killed 10,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, the Qassam Brigades, and other militant groups, these assertions cannot be verified and seem unlikely to be true. It is likely that many of the 10,000 were elderly or boys or were civilian men with no connection to Hamas, or were civilian Hamas party members rather than Qassam Brigade fighters. International Humanitarian Law does not permit militaries to blow unarmed civilians who do not pose an immediate threat to smithereens from the sky, regardless of their party membership.

Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools under the cover of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza. Many Palestinians, including entire communities, have fled their homes and lands. The military has not assured displaced residents that it will protect their security or allow them to return, forcing them to live in precarious conditions elsewhere.

“Settlers and soldiers have displaced entire Palestinian communities, destroying every home, with the apparent backing of higher Israeli authorities,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “While the attention of the world is focused on Gaza, abuses in the West Bank, fueled by decades of impunity and complacency among Israel’s allies, are soaring.”

Human Rights Watch investigated attacks that forcibly displaced all residents of Khirbet Zanuta and Khirbet al-Ratheem south of Hebron, al-Qanub east of Hebron, and Ein al-Rashash and Wadi al-Seeq, east of Ramallah, in October and November 2023. The evidence shows that armed settlers, with the active participation of army units, repeatedly cut off road access and raided Palestinian communities, detained, assaulted, and tortured residents, chased them out of their homes and off their lands at gunpoint or coerced them to leave with death threats, and blocked them from taking their belongings.

Human Rights Watch spoke to 27 witnesses of the attacks, and viewed videos that residents filmed, showing harassment by men in Israeli military uniforms carrying M16 assault rifles. As of April 16, the Israel Defense Forces did not reply to questions Human Rights Watch sent by email on April 7.

Settler attacks on Palestinians increased in 2023 to their highest level since the UN began recording this data in 2006. This was the case even before the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 that killed about 1,100 people inside Israel.

Following October 7, the Israeli military called up 5,500 settlers who are Israeli army reservists, including some with criminal records of violence against Palestinians, and assigned them to West Bank “regional defense” battalions. The authorities distributed 7,000 guns to battalion members and others, including “civilian security squads” established in settlements, according to Haaretz, and Israeli rights groups. Media reported that settlers left leaflets and sent threats on social media to Palestinians after October 7, such as warnings to “flee to Jordan” or be “exterminate[d],” and that “the day of revenge is coming.”

The UN has recorded more than 700 settler attacks between October 7 and April 3, with soldiers in uniform present in nearly half of the attacks. Attacks since October 7 have displaced over 1,200 people, including 600 children, from rural herding communities. At least 17 Palestinians were killed and 400 wounded, while Palestinians have killed 7 settlers in the West Bank since October 7, the UN reported.

On April 12, the body of a 14-year-old Israeli boy was found after he had disappeared from the settlement outpost of Malachei Hashalom. Since then, settlers have attacked at least 17 Palestinian villages and communities in the West Bank, according to OCHA. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, reported that four Palestinians, including a 16-year-old boy, have been killed in these incidents, and that houses and vehicles were set on fire, and livestock killed.

None of those evicted from the five communities investigated have been able to return, Human Rights Watch found. The Israeli military either rejected or did not answer requests to allow residents to return, leaving Palestinians without protection from the same armed settlers and soldiers who threatened to kill them if they returned. One family with seven children, forced to flee on foot from al-Qanub, now lives in a small cinderblock storeroom with no money to pay the rent.

Haqel: In Defense of Human Rights, an Israeli human rights organization, petitioned the Israeli High Court to instruct the army to protect  five Palestinian communities from threats of displacement due to settler violence, and to allow Khirbet Zanuta families to return to their lands. The Israeli state attorney’s February 20 response claimed that no forced displacement occurred in Khirbet Zanuta, and that Palestinians had left voluntarily due to herding and agricultural problems, according to Haqel. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for May 1.

The displaced residents raised sheep. Some said that Israeli attackers stole vehicles, cash, and household appliances, as well as sheep and fodder that families had bought on credit and now cannot repay. Other families escaped with their flocks but had to build new shelters and have nowhere to graze them.

Settlers have subsequently been grazing their own sheep on the communities’ lands, according to rights groups. The Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported that as of mid-March, settlers had taken over 4,000 dunams (about 988 acres) of Palestinian grazing lands since October 7.

Repeated settler attacks, often at night, have caused fear and mental health harm. Children and their parents said children have had nightmares and difficulty concentrating. The attacks destroyed schools in two of the five communities. Most children were unable to go to school for a month or longer after being displaced.

The Israeli police have law-enforcement jurisdiction over settlers, while the army has jurisdiction over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. After October 7, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir instructed police not to enforce the law against violent settlers, an Israeli investigative journalist reported. Police denied the report, though Ben-Gvir did not. The vast majority of Palestinian complaints against settlers and the Israeli military do not result in indictments, based on official data compiled by Yesh Din.

After October 7, the National Security Ministry distributed thousands of guns, including to settlers. In December, the Attorney General’s Office stated in the Knesset that they had found the Ministry had unlawfully approved 14,000 firearms permits.

Countries including the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom have licensed exports of weapons, including assault rifles and ammunition, to Israel. The US has approved more than 100 weapons transfers to Israel since October 7, and exported 8,000 military rifles and 43,000 handguns in 2023, before pausing a shipment of 24,000 assault rifles in December over concerns about settler attacks. It is “almost a certainty” that settlers are using US-made guns, a former US State Department official said.

Since December, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France announced visa policies that barred some violent settlers from entry. The US and UK imposed financial sanctions on a total of eight settlers and two settlement outposts. EU sanctions are still being discussed, due to staunch reluctance by the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Forcible transfer or deportation and the extensive destruction and appropriation of property in occupied territory are war crimes. Israeli authorities’ systematic oppression of and inhumane acts against Palestinians, including war crimes, committed with the intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Governments should suspend military support to Israel, given the risk of complicity in abuses. They should also review and possibly suspend bilateral agreements, such as the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and ban trade with settlements in the occupied territories. The UK should immediately withdraw the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, which restricts public bodies in the UK from deciding not to do business with companies’ operating in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The US, the EU, UK, and other countries should take action to ensure accountability for those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including criminal investigations and prosecutions under universal jurisdiction and at the International Criminal Court. This should include those responsible under command responsibility for failures to prevent or punish crimes by those in their chain of command.

In addition, they should consider sanctions on those responsible for ongoing Israeli attacks on Palestinian communities or for the prevention of displaced Palestinians from returning to their lands, until those subject to sanctions end the attacks and ensure the displaced Palestinians can return, Human Rights Watch said.

“Palestinian children have seen their families brutalized, and their homes and schools destroyed, and the Israeli authorities are ultimately to blame,” Van Esveld said. “Senior state officials are fueling or failing to prevent these attacks, and Israel’s allies are not doing enough to stop that.”

Israeli Attacks Investigated

*** Names have been changed for people’s protection.

Al-Qanub

Settler attacks forced the residents of al-Qanub, 10 kilometers east of the town of Sa’ir, near Hebron in the southern West Bank, to flee on the evening of October 9. The community of about 40 people have been unable to return.

From October 7 to 9, ten to twelve settlers in civilian clothes, armed with handguns and assault rifles, piled up stones each day to block the only road to al-Qanub, which links it to the town of Sa’ir, said Salma, a 29-year-old resident who fled with her husband, Salim, and their seven children.

At 4:30 p.m. on October 9, dozens of armed settlers arrived. “Some went to [get] the sheep, and nine of them came to us,” Salim said. “They had guns and knives.” Settlers ordered them to leave within an hour or they would be killed, and one man said he would “cut our throats, and pointed at us, including our kids.”

One of the homes destroyed in al- Qanub, a Palestinian community in the southern West Bank, after all residents fled from armed settlers on October 9, 2023. © 2023 Private

Dozens of men, with dogs, stole and led the 200 sheep that Salim and his father owned toward a settlement outpost, Salim said. He and several neighbors ran toward them, but “that seemed to trigger [the settlers].” His father feared they would open fire and warned the residents to leave. The men, and women and children fled in different groups: “I told my wife to take the kids and run.”

Salma carried her 8-month-old boy and walked with her other children through rocky terrain for more than five hours in the dark, until 10 p.m., to reach her parents’ home, she said.

Salim, 35, his father, 75, and his children were all born in al-Qanub. “All our life was there,” he said. He is 18,000 shekels (about US$4,800) in debt for sheep fodder that settlers stole, he said. The family is living in a windowless, cinderblock storeroom in a nearby town, with no income to pay the rent.

Settlers from an outpost 400 meters away west of al-Qanub, began harassing residents five years ago, Salim said. It appears the settlers came from the outpost of Pnei Kedem North. Settlers prevented residents from grazing their sheep, and “cut the electricity, and three months ago they cut the water. They even took the pipes.” In December 2021, settlers set dogs on two brothers in al-Qanub and hit one brother with an all-terrain vehicle, and in February 2022, settlers attacked the brothers’ father, 76, fracturing two of his fingers and his skull, the rights group B’Tselem reported.

Wadi al-Seeq

Attacks involving armed settlers in civilian clothes and an Israel Defense Forces unit displaced all 30 families – about 180 people, including 90 children – from Wadi al-Seeq, northeast of Ramallah, on October 12, based on residents’ and human rights groups’ accounts, as well as Israeli news reports.

Beginning on October 7, settlers gathered daily at the entrance of the road that leads to the community. At 8 p.m. on October 11, a group of 8 to 10 men in military uniforms, armed with M16s and some wearing masks, arrived in two trucks, said 46-year-old Abu Hasan.

The uniformed men first entered the tents belonging to Abu Nayef and his sons, destroyed and stole the family’s belongings, then searched other people’s tents until around 3 a.m., Abu Hasan said.

Later that morning, a prominent local settler, armed and wearing civilian clothes, led a group of armed men wearing military uniforms without name tags who had arrived in civilian cars in blocking an access road, while a military vehicle and two police patrol vehicles were stationed nearby, four residents said.

Four vehicles with soldiers, some of whom residents recognized as settlers from prior attacks, then entered Wadi al-Seeq, residents said. The soldiers took residents’ phones, car keys, and IDs, hit people, and entered tents where women and children were taking cover, and threw belongings on the ground, said 30-year-old Marwan M.

The attackers said they would shoot residents if they did not leave within an hour. Abu Bashar said: “They said, you can’t take anything with you, and even the cars were forbidden.” About 30 people were wounded in the attack, according to news reports.

Soldiers entered Reem R.’s tent, shoved her and her children, and took their phones, she said. “One man in uniform kicked me in the back of my neck. They said, ‘Go to the valley, and if you come back, we will kill you.’” As she was fleeing, Reem saw her 20-year-old son, who has a congenital bone condition and a physical disability, lying on the ground, with a settler “stomping on his back,” she said. The women and children, including two with physical disabilities, fled to a cave, where they sheltered for eight hours without food or water, or their phones, until around 8 p.m., then walked toward the town of Taybeh, Reem said.

Bruising on one of the men attacked by settlers and active-duty soldiers, in Wadi al-Seeq on October 12, 2023. The man was hospitalized for his injuries. © 2023 Private

Meanwhile, soldiers forced Marwan M., Abu Hasan, and a third man, Nadim N., onto the ground, bound them, and hit, kicked, and beat them with their gun butts, they said. Another group of soldiers arrived and left, and a civilian vehicle arrived with men in military uniforms. Soldiers dragged the three men to a sheep pen, blindfolded and stripped them to their underwear, replaced the zip-tie on Abu Hasan’s wrists with painful metal wire, and for more than two hours, beat and kicked the men in the head and face. Nadim N. was burned with cigarettes. Marwan M. lost consciousness, he said. The attackers posted images of the men online.

“They took turns beating us, over and over, with threats like, ‘When you die your wife won’t be able to feed your children’,” Abu Hasan said. One man urinated on him, and another kicked him in the chest, stomach, and genitals. “I was screaming in pain. After that he brought a broom handle, jumped on my back, hit me with it and tried to shove it in my anus.”

Abu Hasan said the attackers stole three phones and 2,700 shekels (about US$700) in cash from the three men, and other belongings. In the evening, an Israeli military medic arrived with other soldiers. Marwan M. said, “they gave me glucose, and apologized. We told them how they stole our cars, phones, money, everything, and insisted that they get our things back, but they didn’t respond [to our requests].” He and Abu Hasan were hospitalized.

About five days later, Israeli authorities in two police cars escorted some residents back for two hours to retrieve their belongings, Reem R. said. Her household’s mattresses, blankets, clothes, electrical equipment, refrigerator, car trailer, 250 chickens, and 35,000 shekels (about US$9,400) worth of sheep fodder that was bought on credit, were missing, she said. Other residents’ documents, including birth and marriage certificates, were burned or missing, and two cars, water tanks, donkeys, chickens, and 13 sheep had been stolen, Abu Bashar said. Their homes had been destroyed.

Residents said they filed a complaint at the police station in the Binyamin settlement but have heard nothing since. The military asked two men to submit complaints.

The soldiers involved in the attack were part of the military’s Desert Frontier unit, which recruits residents of settlement outposts, including some settlers with criminal records, Haaretz reported. The military dismissed the commander in October in response to reports about the attack, and in December, dismissed five combat soldiers and froze the unit’s operations following additional violent incidents, Haaretz reported. Human Rights Watch is not aware of anyone having been prosecuted in relation to the events.

In December, the Israeli military filed an order barring the settler leader from most of the West Bank, for three months. He appealed the order. The US sanctioned him in March.

Reem R. and her family are sheltering in a tent on the outskirts of Taybeh. Her children were out of school for more than two months. The school in Wadi al-Seeq, which opened in 2017 and had over 100 students in grades 1 through 8, including children from neighboring communities, was destroyed after the attack.

The families were originally displaced during the 1948 war from what is now Israel. Between 2010 and 2023, the Israeli military issued demolition orders for 110 structures in the community, including the school, for lacking building permits, which are almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain.

Settlers began herding sheep on the community’s lands and harassing residents in February 2023. On August 3, settlers beat children and youth with sticks and tried to steal their sheep, residents said. The army arrested three men who prevented the theft and detained 35-year-old Karim K. on charges of assault and resisting arrest, which his uncle said were bogus. He was released in February on bail and a third-party guarantee.

Khirbet al-Ratheem

Between October 14 and 23, the entire community of about 50 people in Khirbet al-Ratheem, in the southern West Bank, was displaced due to attacks by armed men in military uniforms whom community residents recognized as settlers from previous attacks, accompanied by other soldiers whom residents did not recognize.

Settlers began to harass Khirbet al-Ratheem in 2021, destroying crops and raiding homes at night, former residents said.

On October 7, 2023, soldiers arrived and warned the community not to leave their homes or graze their sheep and blocked all the roads. On October 8, settlers attacked the home of 50-year-old Ghassan G., his 44-year-old wife Farah, and their three children under the age of 18; destroyed two water cisterns; and smashed their solar panels with stones.

At 10 p.m. on October 12, five masked, armed men in military uniforms forced three nearby households into Ghassan’s tent, dragging Ghassan’s elderly father, who had difficulty walking, and pointing an M16 at his head, Farah said. One man told them, “You have 24 hours to leave, [or] we will kill you and take your sheep,” Ghassan said. The attackers punctured their water tanks and cut their gas and water pipes. Ghassan called a humanitarian agency and the nearby municipality of al-Samu’a to help them evacuate but was told it was not possible to coordinate with the Israeli military, he said.

On the night of October 13, masked and armed soldiers, whom a family member identified by their voices as “settlers we’re used to,” entered the family home again, threatened them and demanded their phones. The family member, who hid her phone and video camera, showed Human Rights Watch videos of prior settler attacks.

As Ghassan’s extended family were leaving on October 14, settlers returned and forced them face-down on the ground, beating, kicking, and threatening to kill them, family members said. The family escaped to the town of al-Samu’a, 15 kilometers away, with 220 sheep, a few solar panels, appliances, and mattresses. A neighbor later filmed a settler bulldozing their home.

Ghassan had to build a sheep shelter on the outskirts of al-Samu’a, at a cost of 50,000 shekels (about US $13,400), and buy fodder. Previously, the sheep had grazed on 30 dunams (about 7 acres) of land.

The extended family of 76-year-old Abu A. and his wife, Lana, who have five children under the age of 18 along with adult children and their families, lived nearby. On October 8 or 9, men Abu A. recognized as settlers from an outpost of the Asa’el settlement entered their home and warned them to leave or “we’ll cut your throats.” His family found the slain body of one of their sheep next to their door, on October 11. At 11 p.m. on October 12 or 13, settlers smashed their solar panels, Abu A. said.

At 9 p.m. on October 16, five masked men, one wearing a military uniform and carrying an M16 assault rifle, arrived at Abu A.’s home, “shoved me on the ground, and the one in uniform kicked me in my stomach and hit me in the forehead with the butt of his gun.” The men punctured a water tank and warned them to leave by October 21 “or we will burn you.” Lana was hiding inside with her daughter in law and her daughters, including Anan, 8. Anan said she was very scared and “hid inside the closet and looked through the keyhole.”

Abu A.’s son, Iyad, said that on October 20, a group of uniformed Israeli forces detained him and three of his brothers. Some soldiers beat and stomped on them, and warned them to leave, as other soldiers “sat on the side,” Iyad said.

At noon on October 21, as the family was leaving with their belongings, three soldiers armed with M16s, blindfolded and zip-tied Iyad. Iyad said he was hit on the head with gun butts, taken to an outpost and then to two settlements, and finally to an army base in the Otniel settlement. He was released at 10 p.m. after Israeli police came to the settlement. A photograph taken on October 22 shows Iyad’s swollen hands and raw marks on his wrists, consistent with zip tie restraints.

Abu A., who has 11 siblings, said his family had owned 600 dunams (about 148 acres) of land in the area, where he was born in 1947. His family are now in al-Samu’a, but he could not graze his herd, forcing him to sell 100 of his sheep. He had previously sold his six cows after the Israeli military prevented him from accessing their grazing lands. “We are in debt, [and] we don’t have any income,” he said.

Three brothers from another branch of the family were forced to leave by soldiers whom residents recognized as settlers. One of the brothers, 43-year-old Ayman A., said that after October 7, settlers wearing military-uniform pants, driving a bulldozer and two cars, repeatedly threatened him, his wife and their seven children to leave “or we will burn you.”

On October 23, uniformed soldiers whom Ayman described as settlers, fired their M16s in the air and “threw us onto the ground.” He and his brothers, Mohammed and Amer, said settlers hit them and stomped on their backs. At around 9 p.m., the brothers and their families fled to al-Samu’a but had to leave behind their furniture and appliances.

Their wives and children are staying in a relative’s home in al-Samu’a, while the brothers and their older sons are staying close to a shelter they built for their 150 sheep. “It cost 8,000 shekels [US $2,100] for a bulldozer to clear the ground,” and thousands more in building materials, Ayman said. The sheep, cut off from grazing lands, need 125 kilograms of fodder each day.

Schools in the area switched to online education after October 7 due to the movement restrictions Israel imposed. Only 5 out of 23 schoolchildren in the extended family had devices or phones and were able to attend online classes, a family member said. Some schools reopened in mid-December.

Khirbet Zanuta

Human Rights Watch interviewed members of the extended S. and N. families who fled Khirbet Zanuta, in the southern West Bank, on November 1 due to settler attacks. The entire community of more than 140 people was displaced.

Saleh S., 38, and his wife and four children, ages 5 to 11, said their families had lived in Khirbet Zanuta “since our grandparents’ days.” Settlers established a nearby outpost three years ago and repeatedly harassed the community. After October 7, “they entered the house, cursing at us, harassing the children, swearing at them. It was every other day, if not in the morning, then at night,” Saleh said.

On October 7, settlers bulldozed and blocked the entrance to the road into Khirbet Zanuta from al-Dhahiriya, eight kilometers away, said Saleh’s sister, Abier, 45. In the following weeks, settlers regularly threw stones at their homes at night, hitting the metal roof. “For 10 days we weren’t able to sleep,” said Saleh’s brother Sami, 53, who lived nearby with his wife and three children, two of them under 18. Settlers smashed Saleh’s solar panels and windows and destroyed several residents’ cars.

On October 31, six armed settlers drove all-terrain vehicles to the home of Saleh’s brother Mahmoud, 42, his wife and three children, ages 2 to 9. They detained and beat him, Mahmoud said. Mahmoud said: “They were choking me, I thought they were going to kill me. They hit me with their M16s, all over, [on] my back, my arms. They cursed me and threatened my family, in Arabic and Hebrew. They threw me on the ground. There were cactus spines stuck in me.”

A room under construction by families displaced after attacks by settlers and soldiers from Khirbet Zanuta, in the southern West Bank, November 23, 2023. © 2023 Bill Van Esveld/Human Rights Watch

Saleh and Mahmoud said that they recognized the leader of the settlers who warned residents to leave their homes after October 7. This man had previously carried an M16 or a handgun and led settlers who cut water pipes, punctured water tanks, and used a drone to terrify the family’s sheep, Saleh and Mahmoud said. On November 1, the extended family fled. Sami said settlers armed with M16s “threw rocks at us even while we were leaving.” “We took the solar panels, the sheep, and our [kitchen] cutlery,” but had to leave everything else, said his sister, Abier. The family had to let their 100 pigeons go free. They rented three large trucks to help move their 300 sheep, at a cost of around 3,200 shekels (about US$860).

The family paid 60,000 shekels (US$16,000) to build a new sheep shelter, but without access to their lands, including four water cisterns, they cannot afford to keep the flock. The three brothers built rooms to live in, one per family, in a field near al-Dhahiriya. Saleh said, “I haven’t been able to sleep, I haven’t been able to eat. They forced a Nakba [catastrophe] on us.”

Munir and Sara N., both 38, and their nine children lived in another part of Khirbet Zanuta. At 7 a.m., a few days after October 7, settlers in two trucks, armed with assault rifles, accompanied by soldiers, beat six of Munir’s neighbors, threatening to shoot them. Settlers smashed the windows of a neighbor’s Mitsubishi truck and the windows of nearby houses.

Two days later, at 10 p.m., soldiers and settlers returned. One man threw a stun grenade inside the family home, where the children were sleeping, Sara said. Her daughter, Yara, 13, said, “The soldiers threw a sound bomb [stun grenade] close to us and I got very scared.” “The weapons terrify the younger kids, and we were afraid for their lives,” Munir said.

At midnight, several days later, eight or nine settlers arrived, accompanied by a military vehicle from which three soldiers descended. Settlers assaulted four families living nearby, beat Munir with the butts of their guns, and warned, “You have 24 hours to leave, or we’ll set fire to you.” The next day the family rented trucks at a cost of 2,100 shekels (about US$560) to move their livestock, which now shelter in an unfinished building.

After October 7, settlers also repeatedly flew drones over the family’s penned-in flock of 250 sheep, causing them to panic and trample one another, killing 10 sheep, Munir said.

“We’re all in debt,” Munir said. “If anyone would provide safety and protection for my children from settlers, we would go back [home].” On January 31, rights activists filmed settlers fencing off Khirbet Zanuta’s lands.

Sara’s children had gone to school in Khirbet Zanuta before October 7, but afterward, schools shifted to online learning, “and we don’t have internet devices.”

The school had 27 students from kindergarten to 6th grade, an education official said. It was burned in an apparent arson attack on November 20, and filmed on November 21 by a member of B’tselem, who posted photos and videos online. The school, built with humanitarian support from the EU, the UK, and other European countries, was later bulldozed.

The school’s kindergarten was subsidized and cost parents 150 shekels (about US $40) per year. Nadia, age 4, who had attended the kindergarten, said, “I saw it burned [on social media]. All of it. I got sad, and I started yelling. I used to play with doctor tools, kitchen tools, dolls, and Barbies.” Nadia’s family cannot afford the kindergarten where they are displaced, which costs 200 shekels (about US$53) per month.

School officials partnered with civil society groups to offer psycho-social support programs, a weekly health clinic, and purchased hearing aids for one student, the education official said. “The students lost so much with the loss of the school,” he said.

Ein al-Rashash

All eight families living in Ein al-Rashash fled on October 13 fearing further settler violence, and Bedouin families in the area were also displaced that week due to threats, according to residents and news reports.

The Israeli military has since 2010 issued demolition orders against 73 structures in Ein al-Rashash. Settlers began harassing the community in 2014 after establishing a herding outpost, called Angels of Peace, in a former military base, led by a settler whom residents identified by his first name.

On October 8, the same men appeared in uniform, carrying M16 assault rifles, and blocked the road to the community, said Wesam W., 25. On October 11 and 12, settlers killed six Palestinians in Qusra, about 10 kilometers north of Ein al-Rashash. Fearing a deadly attack, on October 13, the entire community “decided to leave, for our safety and dignity,” said Wesam’s brother Omar, 33. Omar, his wife, and six children, walked to the nearby town of Maghayir.

On October 27, two Israeli rights activists drove Omar back to Ein al-Rashash, hoping to recover some belongings. He found that 18 tents, a car trailer, appliances, solar panels, and sheep fodder that cost 150,000 shekels (about US$40,000) were missing, he said. Seven settlers wearing civilian clothes then arrived on foot and hit and kicked them, said Wesam and one of the activists.

Community members said the Israeli police in the Binyamin settlement would not allow them to file a complaint unless they did so in person, but they declined because police had previously detained and interrogated them about false complaints by settlers.

Omar’s grandparents fled to the West Bank in 1948 as refugees from what is now Israel. The family is now renting a 7-room house in Maghayir, for 35 people. They cannot graze their flock.

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.

We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.

They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.

Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the right

Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of anti-war and civil rights protests, and many conservatives characterized the demonstrators as communist sympathizers.

Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.

11Alive: “Over 20 taken into custody at Emory University after explosive protests”

From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.

Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists hounded college leaders with public pressure campaigns by collecting signatures from students and alumni that called on them to put an end to campus demonstrations. Conservatives also urged donors to withhold financial support until administrators subdued protesting students.

Cops on campus

Following the massacre at Kent State in 1970, when the National Guard fired at students, killing four and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges shut down temporarily amid a wave of nationwide youth outrage. With only a week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes and even some commencement ceremonies.

In response, conservatives launched a new wave of post-Kent State injunctions against those universities to force them back open.

With protests ongoing – and continued calls from the right to crack down on them – many university administrators resorted to calling on the police and the National Guard, working with them to remove student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment brought about the birth of the modern campus police force.

Administrators and lawmakers, afraid that local police could not handle the sheer number of student demonstrators, arranged to deputize campus police – who had historically been parking guards and residence hall curfew enforcers – with the authority to make arrests and carry firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further stifle student dissent with reams of legislation. In 1969, legislators in seven states passed laws to punish student activists who had been arrested during protests through the revocation of financial aid, expulsion and jail sentences.

President Richard Nixon, who had excoriated campus disruptions during his successful White House run in 1968, encouraged college presidents to heed the laws and applauded them for following through with expulsions.

Is ‘antisemitism’ the new ‘communism’?

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I’ll be watching to see how the Trump and Biden campaigns respond to ongoing student protests.

For now, Trump has called the recent protests “antisemitic” and “far worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden has similarly condemned “the antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both are repeating the false framework laid out by GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House inquiries since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

There indeed have been antisemitic incidents associated with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx have baited four women presidents into affirming the right’s politicized framing of the protests as rife with antisemitism, leading the public to believe that isolated incidents are instead representative and rampant.

Like their association of civil rights and peace demonstrators with communism throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now broadly hurling claims of antisemitism against anyone protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, many of whom are Jewish.

The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice: Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Instructor, School of Education, University of New Orleans

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Anne Frank House Center says that, “Zionism is about the pursuit of an independent Jewish state.” That was accomplished in 1948, and affirmed in bloody wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and in various attacks and battles since then. On October 7 the Zionist military apparatus, for all its impressiveness, failed because of hubris. Modern Jewish history didn’t start then. The post-World War I San Remo Conference of 1920 was the genesis for current dynamics, when the artificial boundaries of the Levant were created by the victorious Western empires.  

Zionism is abused as a social and religious cudgel by the Evangelical movement, and has become another tool of divisiveness for the American far-right. Evangelicals, not Jews, comprise a greater plurality of Israeli tourism now, as more American and European Jews reject this narrative of a “false idol,” in the words of author and activist Naomi Klein. She wrote in a recent ‘Street Seder Address’ published in The Guardian, that Zionism “is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide . . . . . a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.”

Netanyahu’s virulent Likud form of Zionism, which he has now allied with the openly racist and even genocidal Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs, has created an image of the movement that is anathema to many progressive and leftist activists, and it fuels anti-Semitism as less informed people on the right and left conflate this ruthless ultra-nationalism with Judaism. Just as marriages can run their course, leading to a necessary divorce, the time has come for Jews to divorce Zionism. Bibi has become a literal Pharaoh to Palestinians.  Klein adds, “From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.”

Democracy Now! Video: “Naomi Klein: Jews Must Raise Voices for Palestine, Oppose “False Idol of Zionism”

It’s important to remember that “Judaism and Zionism are two distinct terms often intertwined, in reality, they represent rather distinct concepts with different historical, cultural, and most importantly, political implications,” as noted in The Business Standard.  They add, “Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that continues to support the development and protection of the State of Israel. Zionism, at its core, can be understood as a manifestation of Jewish nationalism.”  Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a political ideology.

 The original anti-Zionists were, “from fringe Orthodox sects and maintain that Israel can only be regained miraculously. They view the present state as a blasphemous human attempt to usurp God’s role, and many seek to dismantle the secular State of Israel. However, unlike many gentile anti­-Zionists, Jewish anti-Zionists usually firmly believe in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel, but only at the future time of redemption.”  Though the Neturei Karta were the most visible of observant anti-Zionists, most Haredim in Israel continue that tradition with their refusal to participate in the military or support the embattled state.

Klein asserts that the Zionist ideology, “. . .  is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children. Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child. . . . Including the love we have as a people for text and for education. . . .Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets.” She calls this “scholasticide,” which is parallel to the burning of libraries and synagogues by Nazis.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is one of many Western Jewish organizations that continues to promote the false idol narrative.  They argue that anti-Zionism means that Jews “do not have a right to self-determination — or that the Jewish people’s religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid.” The AJC also says that, “Calling for a Palestinian nation-state, while simultaneously advocating for an end to the Jewish nation-state is hypocritical at best, and potentially anti-Semitic.” The polemical problem is that the Jewish nation is a powerful “fact on the ground,” though threatened by hostile outside forces. Israel is a political reality. But Judaism and Zionism are also threatened internally by Bibi’s leadership record of self-destruction, as his primary aim is political self-preservation. Israel’s economy and security are also undermined by the refusal of the Haredim to support the state and serve in the military.

Not only can Israel remain secure without Zionism; it may become more secure, as the provocations towards Palestinians would cease. The Temple Sunday School narrative minimizes, euphemizes and marginalizes what Palestinians suffered in the Nabka, concurrent with Israeli independence. It’s time to correct that false narrative, and recognize that Zionism has run its course.

The outpouring of objection to American funding of the Israeli war machine is unprecedented in size and scope. In turn the size and scope of government efforts to quash these protests is also unprecedented, now becoming evocative of Kent State in 1970. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when anyone proposes placing National Guard troops on a US college campus. Doing so would be a provocation and incitement for escalation, and that game plan appears to be unfolding.

Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, have all been plagued by departures from their spiritual ethics into orgies of violence. We see this phenomenon in Bibi’s brand of imperial Zionism, Hamas’ and other extremist groups’ violent perversion of Islam, preferring an ideology of hate and misogyny, and the White Christian Nationalist movement in the US, fueled by Trump. The religions of Christianity and Islam have struggled to come to terms with secular modernity, and have seen powerful and violent movements during that struggle. Judaism has the spiritual Reform movement, but no corresponding social-political movement. Judaism came first and has an obligation to take the lead in creating a new paradigm, of a monotheistic, biblically-rooted tradition that nevertheless stands for tolerance and human rights for all. Jews must recognize that the shelf-life of Zionism has expired. Also important is that Judaism is a religion, not a form of ethno-nationalism, despite former President Trump’s attempts to dragoon all Jews into the effort to censor free speech over Palestinian human rights.

(The Conversation) – Accusations about Israeli censorship of the media went mainstream in the US recently when the New York Times published an opinion piece headlined: The Israeli Censorship Regime is Growing. That Needs to Stop..

In the piece Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), wrote: “The high rate of journalists’ deaths and arrests, including a slew in the West Bank; laws allowing its government to shut down foreign news outlets deemed a security risk, which the prime minister has explicitly threatened to use against Al Jazeera; and its refusal to permit foreign journalists independent access to Gaza all speak to a leadership that is deliberately restricting press freedom. That is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.”

As well as restrictions on media access to Gaza, particular broadcasters face other restrictions. At the start of April Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proclaimed he would “act immediately to stop” Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel.

Israel’s parliament passed a bill allowing it to close Al Jazeera’s office in Israel, block its website and ban local channels from using its coverage. However ongoing ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, brokered through Qatar, were perhaps a bulwark against haste. The company is still broadcasting from Israel, but its future status is uncertain.

At the annual International Journalism Festival in Perugia on April 17-21, one of Al Jazeera’s former Gaza-based correspondents Youmna ElSayed, spoke of the dangers of covering the war as a Palestinian journalist, including the belief that she, along with others, had been targeted by the Israeli military. “Journalists were under fire from day one,” she said. Despite having little equipment and the destruction of media offices, “We did what we could to show the world what was really going on,” she said.

The CPJ said on April 20 that at least 97 journalists and media workers were among the more than 34,000 people killed since the war began.

ElSayed regretted leaving Gaza but said it was her only choice to save the lives of her children. She said: “This entire world would have known nothing, seen nothing of what has been happening in Gaza … if it wasn’t for those Palestinian journalists.”

She claimed that international journalists had given up on forcing the Israeli army to let them into Gaza. “This is something that is unprecedented and has not happened anywhere else in the world. But yet, international journalists have given up on that right.”

Access to Gaza

However, journalists’ organisations and the correspondents themselves have been lobbying for access to Gaza for months now. But the Israeli government appears to be not giving way.

“Eyeless in Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream, Dreamworld v. 3, PS Express, 2024

The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, also speaking in Perugia, confirmed that it had been a really difficult story to cover, principally, “because the main meat of it – which is what’s happening in Gaza, we can’t get close to”.

From a production point of view, he said sometimes it feels like, “climbing through mud trying to generate the material that’s necessary to put together a report for television news”. He added it was very hard “to be a TV reporter on a story that you can’t see yourself”.

The Israeli government says the number of international journalists given press accreditation to work in Israel since October 2023 is 3,400. This has given journalists access to the West Bank and enabled coverage of settler violence against the local Palestinian population, but not to Gaza.

But as I wrote in November, the only permitted trips into Gaza have been via Israel Defense Forces-controlled embeds (where the journalist travels with the military and therefore their ability to see or cover stories is restricted).

CNN’s Clarissa Ward was the first foreign journalist who made it into Gaza without the army, and she did this by accompanying an aid convoy supported by the United Arab Emirates in December 2023. During this two-hour trip to Rafah, where 2.3 million residents are now based, the area was bombed and she filmed operations in a field hospital, and talked to doctors and injured children.

With 20 years of war reporting under her belt, she concluded: “Like Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol, Gaza will go down as one of the great horrors of modern warfare.”

From outside the country, media outlets keep trying to check and verify information on the bombings from the IDF by using geo-location and AI software to scan satellite imagery for bomb craters and destruction. In December this enabled the New York Times to conclude that “during the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians”.

Israeli media coverage

Within Israel, the media are mostly publishing the IDF version of events unchallenged. According to Israeli journalist and activist Anat Saragusti: “Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what’s going on in Gaza. We don’t see atrocities, the rubble, the destruction and the humanitarian crisis. The world sees something completely different.”

Meanwhile, the left-wing newspaper Haaretz (published in Hebrew and in English) has been threatened with financial penalties for “sabotaging Israel in wartime” through its more nuanced journalism. According to reporter Ido David Cohen, writing in December, it is the television news channels that present the most extreme example of censorship, as they have “devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties”.

In the same article, cultural commentator and academic David Gurevitz claimed the numbers of Palestinians killed remains an abstract concept for many Israelis: “The Israeli audience isn’t capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim of the other side as such, and the media follow suit.”

This argument was backed up this month by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein who wrote: “The most taboo number in Israel is 34,000. You can’t talk about it, you can’t mention it, and if someone speaking on a panel accidentally blurts it out, they should add, disdainfully: ‘according to Palestinian sources’.”

Colleen Murrell, Full Professor in Journalism, Dublin City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The impressive number of 17 seats won by Israel’s extremist religious party, Shas, in the 1999 election was a watershed moment in the history of these parties, whose ideological roots go back to Avraham Itzhak Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Hacohen.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé referred to the Kooks’ ideological influence as a “fusion of dogmatic messianism and violence”.

Throughout the years, these religious parties struggled on several fronts: their inability to unify their ranks, their failure to appeal to mainstream Israeli society and their inability to strike the balance between their messianic political discourse and the kind of language – not necessarily behaviour – that Israel’s western allies expect.

Though much of the financial support and political backing of Israel’s extremists originate in the United States and, to a lesser extent, European countries, Washington has been clear regarding its public perception of Israel’s religious extremists.

In 2004, the United States banned the Kach party, which could be seen as the modern manifestation of the Kooks and Israel’s early religious Zionist ideologues.

The founder of the group, Meir Kahane was, in fact, assassinated in November 1990 while the extremist rabbi – responsible for much violence against innocent Palestinians throughout the years – was giving another hate-filled speech in Manhattan.

Kahane’s death was only the start of much violence meted out by his followers, lead among them an American doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down on 25 February 1994, dozens of Palestinian Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

Hindustan Times Video: “‘Attack Rafah Or…’: Ben-Gvir Threatens To Bring Down Netanyahu Govt After IDF Troop Withdrawal”

The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers while protesting the massacre was nearly as many as those killed by Goldstein earlier in the day, a tragic but a perfect representation of the relationship between the Israeli state and the violent settlers who operate as part of a larger state agenda.

That massacre was a watershed moment in the history of religious Zionism. Instead of serving as an opportunity to marginalise their growing influence, by the supposedly more liberal Zionists, they grew in power and, ultimately, political influence within the Israeli state.

Goldstein himself became a hero, whose grave, in Israel’s most extremist illegal settlement in the West Bank, Kiryat Arba, is now a popular shrine, a place of pilgrimage for thousands of Israelis.

Particularly telling is that Goldstein’s shrine has been built opposite Meir Kahane’s Memorial Park, which is indicative of the clear ideological connections between these individuals, groups and also funders.

In recent years, however, the traditional role played by Israel’s religious Zionists began to shift, leading to the election of Itamar Ben-Gvir to the Israeli Knesset in 2021 and, ultimately, to his role as the country’s national security minister in December 2022.

Ben-Gvir is a follower of Kahane. “It seems to me that ultimately Rabbi Kahane was about love. Love for Israel without compromise, without any other consideration,” he said in November 2022.

But, unlike Kahane, Ben-Gvir was not satisfied with the role of religious Zionists as cheerleaders for the settlement movement, almost daily raids of Al-Aqsa and the occasional attacks on Palestinians. He wanted to be at the centre of Israeli political power.

Whether Ben-Gvir achieved his status as a direct result of the successful grassroots work of religious Zionism, or because the political circumstances of Israel itself have changed in his favour, is an interesting debate.

The truth, however, might be somewhere in the middle. The historic failure of Israel’s so-called political left – namely the Labor Party – has, in recent years, propelled a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon – the political centre.

Meanwhile, Israel’s traditional right, the Likud Party, grew weaker, partly because it failed to appeal to the growing, more youthful religious Zionism constituency, and also because of the series of splits, which occurred as a result of Ariel Sharon’s breaking-up of the party in and the founding of Kadima in 2005 – a party which has been long disbanded.

To survive, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has redefined his party to its most extremist version of all time and, thus, began to attract religious Zionists with the hope of filling the gaps created because of internal infighting within the Likud.

By doing so, Netanyahu has granted religious Zionists the opportunity of a lifetime.

Soon, following the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and in the early days of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Ben-Gvir launched his National Guard, a group which he tried, but failed, to compose prior to the war.

Thanks to Ben-Gvir, Israel, now, per the words of opposition leader Yair, has become a country with a “private militia”.

By 19 March, Ben-Gvir announced that 100,000 gun permits had been handed over to his supporters. It is within this period that the US began imposing ‘sanctions’ on a few individuals affiliated with Israel’s settler extremist movement, a small slap on the wrist considering the massive damage that has already been done and the great violence that is likely to follow in the coming months and years.

Unlike Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir’s thinking is not limited to his desire to reach a specific position within the government. Israel’s religious extremists are seeking a fundamental and irreversible shift in Israeli politics.

The relatively recent push to change the relationship between the judicial and exclusive branches of government was as important to those extremists as it was to Netanyahu himself. The latter, however, has championed such an initiative to shield himself against legal accountability, while Ben-Gvir’s supporters have a different reason in mind: they want to be able to dominate the government and the military, with no accountability or oversight.

Israel’s religious Zionists are playing a long game, which is not linked to a particular election, individual or government coalition. They are redefining the state, along with its ideology. And they are winning.

It goes without saying that Ben-Gvir, and his threats to topple Netanyahu’s coalition government, have been the main driving force behind the genocide in Gaza.

If Meir Kahane was still alive, he would have been proud of his followers. The ideology of the once marginalised and loathed extremist rabbi is now the backbone of Israeli politics.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF concerning escalating repression of protest on campuses

The Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom view with increasing alarm the growing number of attempts to intimidate, repress, and criminalize campus protests against the ongoing Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the US diplomatic, military, and economic support for it. Federal, state and local government officials—from the president, to congressional members, to governors and mayors—have exacerbated the threats on campuses by encouraging university administrators to violate basic commitments to freedom of expression, while casually smearing overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with unsubstantiated claims of violence or discriminatory speech. University leaders should constitute the first line of defense for students and faculty in the face of forces seeking to vilify, harass, and silence them. Instead, we regret that several university boards of trustees, presidents, and their administrations have acquiesced in the ugliest of campaigns targeting their students and faculty for engaging in what have been peaceful protests, joined by a wide cross-section of their campus community.

As Palestine solidarity and anti-war demonstrations have proliferated and intensified, sweeping characterizations of them as violent, dangerous, and antisemitic have been deployed as part of a campaign that has weaponized the language of “safety” to delegitimize, intimidate, and forcibly disperse legal, peaceful dissent. University administrations, most egregiously at Columbia, New York University, and Yale have—in some cases, in violation of their own university policies—called in the police to break up protests and arrest tens of students, some of whom have been summarily suspended and evicted from university housing. At NYU, faculty, too, were arrested. The University of Southern California cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement address after a slanderous hate campaign was launched against her for her pro-Palestinian views; the University of Pennsylvania revoked Penn Against the Occupation’s status as a registered student group; Harvard has now banned that university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Given the developments of the past several weeks, we are extremely concerned about what these disturbing events portend as commencement season approaches.

Attempts by universities to limit or suppress Gaza war-related speech and protest have been all too common since shortly after the 7 October attack. But the growing securitization and outright repression on campuses have reached levels not seen since the 1960s. We are witnessing a situation in which, in the name of security, it is university leaders themselves who have become the primary threat to the rights and safety of members of the campus community. The appeasement of malign forces seeking to destroy academic freedom, faculty governance, and curricular diversity, in which Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik so willingly participated during her 17 April congressional hearing, must not be allowed to metastasize. Today the goal is to suppress speech on Palestine, but the battle over free speech and academic freedom on our campuses did not begin, nor does it end, there.

We therefore call upon college and university boards of trustees, presidents, and administrations across the country immediately to clearly and forcefully recommit themselves to the freedom of inquiry, expression, and protest on campus that have been pillars of the US academy for decades. As the massive killing and destruction in Gaza continue, we also demand that you fulfill your responsibility to your profession and your campus community to defend peaceful protesters, uphold academic freedom, and reject all pressures seeking to criminalize peaceful encampments and demonstrations against this horrendous war—and our government’s complicity in it.

Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.

The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).

Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.

The Israeli military has also murdered from the sky 5,479 students and 261 teachers .

Reliefweb notes,

“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).

Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.

About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.

As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.

The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.

@pandapunk303 The sad part is they wont face any punishment. #freepalestine🇵🇸❤️ #alazhar #alazharuniversity #freepalestine #palestine #gaza #istandwithpalestine #foryou #fyp #crime #university #school #speakup #tiktoknew #wow #sad #messedup ♬ سبحان الله – Ali Dawud

The footage below says it shows the state last winter of al-Azhar University in Gaza:

“Destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza”

Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.

This was AUG’s medical school.

AU Gaza Kulliyat al-Tibb

That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.

This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.

(The Conversation) – As Israel’s air campaign in Gaza enters its sixth month after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, it has been described by experts as one of the most relentless and deadliest campaigns in recent history. It is also one of the first being coordinated, in part, by algorithms.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to assist with everything from identifying and prioritising targets to assigning the weapons to be used against those targets.

Academic commentators have long focused on the potential of algorithms in war to highlight how they will increase the speed and scale of fighting. But as recent revelations show, algorithms are now being employed at a large scale and in densely populated urban contexts.

This includes the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, but also in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, where the US is experimenting with algorithms to target potential terrorists through Project Maven.

Amid this acceleration, it is crucial to take a careful look at what the use of AI in warfare actually means. It is important to do so, not from the perspective of those in power, but from those officers executing it, and those civilians undergoing its violent effects in Gaza.

This focus highlights the limits of keeping a human in the loop as a failsafe and central response to the use of AI in war. As AI-enabled targeting becomes increasingly computerised, the speed of targeting accelerates, human oversight diminishes and the scale of civilian harm increases.

Speed of targeting

Reports by Israeli publications +927 Magazine and Local Call give us a glimpse into the experience of 13 Israeli officials working with three AI-enabled decision-making systems in Gaza called “Gospel”, “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?”.

These systems are reportedly trained to recognise features that are believed to characterise people associated with the military arm of Hamas. These features include membership of the same WhatsApp group as a known militant, changing cell phones every few months, or changing addresses frequently.

The systems are then supposedly tasked with analysing data collected on Gaza’s 2.3 million residents through mass surveillance. Based on the predetermined features, the systems predict the likelihood that a person is a member of Hamas (Lavender), that a building houses such a person (Gospel), or that such a person has entered their home (Where’s Daddy?).

In the investigative reports named above, intelligence officers explained how Gospel helped them go “from 50 targets per year” to “100 targets in one day” – and that, at its peak, Lavender managed to “generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”. They also reflected on how using AI cuts down deliberation time: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage … I had zero added value as a human … it saved a lot of time.”

They justified this lack of human oversight in light of a manual check the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ran on a sample of several hundred targets generated by Lavender in the first weeks of the Gaza conflict, through which a 90% accuracy rate was reportedly established. While details of this manual check are likely to remain classified, a 10% inaccuracy rate for a system used to make 37,000 life-and-death decisions will inherently result in devastatingly destructive realities.

“Lavender III,” Digital Imagining, Dream, Dreamland v. 3, 2024

But importantly, any accuracy rate number that sounds reasonably high makes it more likely that algorithmic targeting will be relied on as it allows trust to be delegated to the AI system. As one IDF officer told +927 magazine: “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”

The IDF denied these revelations in an official statement to The Guardian. A spokesperson said that while the IDF does use “information management tools […] in order to help intelligence analysts to gather and optimally analyse the intelligence, obtained from a variety of sources, it does not use an AI system that identifies terrorist operatives”.

The Guardian has since, however, published a video of a senior official of the Israeli elite intelligence Unit 8200 talking last year about the use of machine learning “magic powder” to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza. The newspaper has also confirmed that the commander of the same unit wrote in 2021, under a pseudonym, that such AI technologies would resolve the “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets”.

Scale of civilian harm

AI accelerates the speed of warfare in terms of the number of targets produced and the time to decide on them. While these systems inherently decrease the ability of humans to control the validity of computer-generated targets, they simultaneously make these decisions appear more objective and statistically correct due to the value that we generally ascribe to computer-based systems and their outcome.

This allows for the further normalisation of machine-directed killing, amounting to more violence, not less.

While media reports often focus on the number of casualties, body counts – similar to computer-generated targets – have the tendency to present victims as objects that can be counted. This reinforces a very sterile image of war. It glosses over the reality of more than 34,000 people dead, 766,000 injured and the destruction of or damage to 60% of Gaza’s buildings and the displaced persons, the lack of access to electricity, food, water and medicine.

It fails to emphasise the horrific stories of how these things tend to compound each other. For example, one civilian, Shorouk al-Rantisi, was reportedly found under the rubble after an airstrike on Jabalia refugee camp and had to wait 12 days to be operated on without painkillers and now resides in another refugee camp with no running water to tend to her wounds.

Aside from increasing the speed of targeting and therefore exacerbating the predictable patterns of civilian harm in urban warfare, algorithmic warfare is likely to compound harm in new and under-researched ways. First, as civilians flee their destroyed homes, they frequently change addresses or give their phones to loved ones.

Such survival behaviour corresponds to what the reports on Lavender say the AI system has been programmed to identify as likely association with Hamas. These civilians, thereby unknowingly, make themselves suspect for lethal targeting.

Beyond targeting, these AI-enabled systems also inform additional forms of violence. An illustrative story is that of the fleeing poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was allegedly arrested and tortured at a military checkpoint. It was ultimately reported by the New York Times that he, along with hundreds of other Palestinians, was wrongfully identified as Hamas by the IDF’s use of AI facial recognition and Google photos.

Over and beyond the deaths, injuries and destruction, these are the compounding effects of algorithmic warfare. It becomes a psychic imprisonment where people know they are under constant surveillance, yet do not know which behavioural or physical “features” will be acted on by the machine.

From our work as analysts of the use of AI in warfare, it is apparent that our focus should not solely be on the technical prowess of AI systems or the figure of the human-in-the-loop as a failsafe. We must also consider these systems’ ability to alter the human-machine-human interactions, where those executing algorithmic violence are merely rubber stamping the output generated by the AI system, and those undergoing the violence are dehumanised in unprecedented ways.

Lauren Gould, Assistant Professor, Conflict Studies, Utrecht University; Linde Arentze, Researcher into AI and Remote Warfare, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Marijn Hoijtink, Associate Professor in International Relations, University of Antwerp

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.