Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War (updated to 18 June 2024) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Gaza A HISTORY OF RESISTANCE AND FREEDOM
AMAZON, 2024
Introduction to a book about the global event of the war between The Zionist entity and Gaza: In the annals of contemporary history, few conflicts have stirred the collective consciousness of the world as profoundly as the war between The Zionist entity and Gaza. This riveting saga, marked by its complex geopolitical underpinnings and the human tragedy that unfolded on the ground, transcended regional boundaries to become a global focal point. The clash, which erupted between the formidable The Zionist entity military and the resilient forces in Gaza, captured the attention and emotions of people worldwide, prompting a reevaluation of political alliances, moral stances, and the very foundations of international relations. The intricate dynamics of the conflict defy easy characterization, weaving a tapestry of historical grievances, political ambitions, and the enduring struggle for self-determination. This book seeks to unravel the multifaceted layers of this global event, delving into the historical context, the socio-political ramifications, and the human stories that emerged from the heart of the battlefield. From the bustling streets of Gaza to the corridors of power in The Zionist entity and the international responses that reverberated across the globe, the narrative unfolds with the intent of providing 8 a comprehensive understanding of a conflict that resonated far beyond its geographic boundaries. As we embark on this exploration, it is essential to approach the subject with a nuanced perspective, recognizing the complexities inherent in the Zionist entity-Gaza conflict. This is not merely a tale of military strategies and geopolitical maneuvering but a profound examination of the lives affected, the aspirations dashed, and the implications for global peace and security. Through meticulous research, firsthand accounts, and a commitment to presenting diverse viewpoints, this book aims to offer readers a comprehensive and unbiased analysis of the events that unfolded during this tumultuous period. By shedding light on the historical antecedents, the immediate triggers, and the aftermath of the conflict, we hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of a war that left an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of humanity. As we turn the pages of this book, let us embark on a journey to comprehend the profound impact of the Zionist entity-Gaza conflict on the world stage — a conflict that, beyond its regional ramifications, forced the global community to confront enduring questions about justice, sovereignty, and the pursuit of lasting peace in a troubled world
Gaza’s Agony: An Alternative Perspective on Recent Events
The corporate media has largely ignored the brutal chronology of events in Gaza and the horrific living conditions in Gaza that have gradually intensified since Israel officially left the territory in 2005. While the reasons for such blinkered journalism are beyond the scope of this article; I will offer an idea for the reader’s consideration: “…the imperial mentality is so deeply embedded in Western culture that this travesty passes without criticism, even notice.” (Chomsky & Pappe: 2010.) Considering the current state of affairs in Gaza; this absence of depth and context creates the false impression that Palestinians are innately violent and self-destructive.
Xavier Pons Rafols, 2024
The purpose of this essay/editorial - closed on 8 January 2024 - is to formulate as fully as possible, although necessarily provisional, an approach from the perspective of International Law to the war in Gaza that began a little over three months ago, and more generally to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has lasted at least seventy-five years, with the creation of the state of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli war and the Nakba to which the Palestinian people have been condemned. In other words, this is a brief international legal approach to a moment of crisis and intensification of a historic conflict that, in these months, has been a real turning point in the endless cycle of violence that has plagued the region for decades. To this end, this essay addresses various issues of international legal relevance in relation to the current war in Gaza, such as the conceptualisation of international terrorism; the justification of legitimate self-defence used by Israel and, in particular, the conditions required by International Law for its exercise; as well as the possible commission of serious crimes of international concern - war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide -, the applicability of International Humanitarian Law and the call for individual criminal responsibility in this context. This essay also analyses the response of the international community organized in the United Nations to the current war in Gaza, highlighting the insufficient action of the Security Council during these months of acute crisis, the majority reaction of the General Assembly calling for a cessation of hostilities, and the repeated and futile humanitarian appeals made by its Secretary-General. In order to place the current crisis in the perspective of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, there are also briefly discussed the historical and political context, in particular the results of the occupation of territories in the Six-Day War of 1967, the consistent position of the General Assembly on the Palestinian question, the United Nations action on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as the Security Council’s action on these Territories and the proposed peace initiatives, in particular with regard to the two-State solution. The essay concludes with concluding remarks and an epilogue where, in view of the current humanitarian catastrophe and the protracted nature of the conflict, calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the release of hostages, and for the current phase of the conflict to become a genuine turning point that can be grasped as an opportunity for peace in the region.
Gaza Unsilenced - Refaat Alareer, Laila El-Haddad (eds)
The editors of this remarkable collection ask, 'After the smoke clears, who will remember the dead?' Their answer, and that of their dozens of writers, poets, journalists, and analysts, is "We will." We, they said, Palestinians of Gaza who survived the slaughter, we Palestinians from elsewhere in Palestine and refugees in far-flung exile, we allies and friends from around the world, we will not let the world forget. During the 50 days of Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, Tel Aviv's best efforts to keep the world in the dark and to keep the West believing the lie of self-defense, all failed. They failed because Palestinians did not all die, and those who lived were determined to tell their story in their own voices: their poetry, their memories, and their children. This extraordinary book joins the narrative of Palestine's witness-of oppression, brutality, and death, but also of life reaffirmed and resistance reclaimed."-PHYLLIS BENNIS Institute for Policy Studies "Readers will find this rich anthology highly informative, evocative, and inspirational. They will find in it culture, creativity, and commitment. And they will also find it painful, emotional, and overpowering, such is the unremitting cruelty with which Palestinians are treated. But read it they must.... It enables us to communicate, even more powerfully, why justice is needed and needed now, and why Israel must be brought to justice. If any book is a must-read by the Prosecutor and judges at the International Criminal Court, this book is it."-NADIA HIJAB Executive Director, Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network "Gaza Unsilenced is an outstanding collection of short essays that discuss different aspects of Israel's murderous assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014. Given the ability of Israel and its American defenders to propagandize and distort the historical record, it is imperative that books like this be published and widely read. Israel cannot be allowed to create a false history about the horrors it has inflicted on the people of Gaza and the Palestinians more generally."-JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago "Israel takes the hammer to Gaza, but it cannot snuff out Palestinian voices. These continue to testify to the inhumanity of the Israeli occupation. There are also silences-the book ends with a list of the names of those killed in Israel's 2014 bombing of Gaza, human beings who cannot tell us their stories. This book tries to fill that gap."-VIJAY PRASHAD Editor, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation Just World Books exists to expand the discourse in the United States and worldwide on issues of vital international concern. We are committed to building a more just, equitable, and peaceable world. We uphold the equality of all human persons. We aim for our books to contribute to increasing understanding across national, religious, ethnic, and racial lines; to share more broadly the reflections, analyses, and policy prescriptions of pathbreaking activists for peace; and to help to prevent war.
A SPECIAL PROJECT ON THE WAR IN GAZA INTRODUCTION: A COLONIAL WAR
Palestine/Israel Review, 2024
The settler-colonial paradigm has gained traction in the study of Palestine/Israel in recent years. The current war in Gaza, with the International Court of Justice ruling that a genocide is plausible, has highlighted the pivotal role of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand and contextualize the current wave of apocalyptic violence. At the same time, references to settler colonialism have triggered discursive resistance among certain academic circles. To debate this issue, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?”. While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. Five scholars from different disciplines participated in the webinar.
In Gaza, Catastrophic Violence of War and Slow Violence of Oppression Collide
Just Security, 2023
Nathan Thrall's harrowing new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, illustrates the slow, enduring violence of decades of Israeli occupation through the lens of a singular tragedy. At the heart of the book is a fatal 2012 school bus accident in which Abed Salama's five-year-old son Milad and several other Palestinian children are killed at the outskirts of Jerusalem. As Thrall's telling makes clear, the accident could be labeled accidental in only a literal and immediate sense: no one intended, planned, or desired it. And yet, the conditions that made a rainy day deadly were far from accidental. It was not only weather, or individual decision-making, or bad driving that led to a fatal collision between Milad's school bus and a semitrailer truck. It was also poor infrastructure, undertrained drivers, a lack of regulation, and failed schools; a physical obstacle in the form of the Separation Barrier dictating where children attend school, play, and receive medical care; and that Israeli military and police forces are tasked primarily with protecting Israeli lives while the Palestinian Authority, in many parts of the West Bank, is prohibited from operating. Moreover, Palestinian life has become simultaneously globally less visible and locally more precarious in recent years: Palestinian national aspirations have been marginalized in regional and global politics even as Israeli settlers, supported by extreme right-wing governments, further expand their territorial control over the West Bank while terrorizing Palestinians. The story Thrall tells, with precision and compassion, is one of a normalized regime of state violence that impedes, reroutes, and structures Palestinian life every day. It is a regime comprised, framed, and regulated by and through law, even if Thrall doesn't frame it this way. It might seem inapt or even inappropriate to recall a decade-old tragedy as Israel besieges and bombs Gaza. Yet the story of five-year-old Milad Salama bears telling in this moment because his death was structured by the same mundane, slow violence that conditioned his, his father's, and millions of others' whole lives. It reveals how structural
Gaza Writes Back: Narrating Palestine
Biography, 2014
More than fi ve years ago, during Israel's 2008-09 twenty-three-day largescale offensive war on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, my little daughter, Shymaa, who was only fi ve years old, asked me and my wife a question that still puzzles me, as on several occasions it has become my own. Amidst the sounds of explosions and the smell of gunpowder, her question, in her soft, shaky voice, came as a shock to both of us. "Who created the Jews?" she asked, looking me in the eyes and then turning to her mother in anticipation of an answer. For a while, neither of us was able to talk, let alone answer her question. Bemused, I offered to tell her a story, and several other stories followed. If I could not answer her question, one thing I did know was why Shymaa, in the space of a few weeks, had grown up enough to ask such a profound question. She must have thought that the merciful and loving God she learns about in her kindergarten, Who usually saves the good guys in her mother's stories, could not be the same God who created those killing machines that for long days and nights brought us nothing but death, chaos, destruction, tears, pain, and fear, causing her and her little brothers to wake up at night and sob hysterically. Her version of God could not be the creator of the same people who caused our windows to shatter and who, two days earlier, shot at her father when I was fi lling water tanks on the roof of our house during the two-hour ceasefi re. Israel's Operation Cast Lead murdered more than 1,400 Palestinians and injured thousands, most of whom were children, women, and elderly people. Many of the injured are now disabled for life, and many of the martyrs left children and wives orphaned and widowed for life. Five years ago, Israel destroyed more than 6,000 housing units. More than 20,000 Palestinians were made homeless, some forcibly displaced for the fourth or fi fth time in their
REVIEW: Behind the war on Gaza – how Israel profits globally from repression
Pacific Journalism Review, 2024
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2023. 265 pages. ISBN 9781922310408. JUST MONTHS before the outbreak of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza after the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas resistance fighters on 7 October 2023, Australian-German investigative journalist and researcher Antony Loewenstein published an extraordinarily timely book, The Palestine Laboratory. In it he warned that a worst-case scenario—‘long feared but never realised, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security’. https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/pacific-journalism-review/article/view/1341
The War on Gaza: Politics, Ethics, and International Law
Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2023
The full text of Azmi Bishara's lecture titled "The War on Gaza: Politics, Ethics, and International Law" held on 28 November 2023 at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS).