Sprouting from death
Susan Abulhawa, Electronic Intifada, Apr 25 2024
It’s almost 5 am in al-Mawasi Rafah. And we’ve been hearing the sounds of Israeli bombs since midday yesterday. They’re intermittent, maybe two or three every couple of hours. There’s a saying here that if you can hear them, then you’re okay. For reasons I don’t yet understand, people who are bombed don’t hear the explosive metallic hatred that buries them alive, tears their limbs, burns their faces and steals life from them even if they survive. People no longer pay attention to their booms, except to utter ya sater, a perfunctory prayer to protect whomever, wherever. As the world has gotten smaller and dimmer here, conversations swirl around two topics, food and bombs, repeating with daily updates. What did one eat, what is there to eat, what will one eat, how long will one’s stock last, how will they get the next meal, what aid has been allowed in, how high are the prices, how many have starved or are starving to death.
Apples were the talk of the town last week. They appeared in the market for the first time since Israel forbade, then restricted the entry of foods. For the majority of Palestinians here, it was their first taste of fresh fruit in almost seven months. Those with mobile phones filmed their first bites. Other fresh foods have not followed, but apples abound, even though most cannot afford them. Talk surrounding bombs are more varied. Of course, it’s not just bombs, but tanks and snipers, spy and killer drones and a host of other death technology. Most agree that an assault on Rafah is imminent. A video circulating social media shows an Israeli commander hyping up his unit by promising they will wipe Rafah away like they did Shujaiya, Beit Hanoun, Khan Younis. The soldiers grunt and cheer, affirming the fervor of genocide. Some ask:
Have you seen the video?
But most have not. They don’t have internet. They ask:
Where are we supposed to go now?
The poet Mahmoud Darwish once asked:
Where do birds fly after the last sky?
The meager tents of the displaced have already taken root. The precarious assemblage of string, cloth, wood and plastic have been filled with items slowly accumulated over half a year of a Zionist genocidal war. Donated stove plates and propane tanks, plates and flatware, blankets, clothes, bedrolls, notebooks, food, toothbrushes and other things of living neatly arranged on makeshift shelves and hooks, cannot be easily moved.
How can we carry it all?
How do we move again?
People are tired.
My heart can’t take it. Just let them bomb us. Death is better than this life.
Where are we supposed to go now? Where do birds fly after the last sky? To Nuseirat in the Middle Area. That’s the rumor. Tanks just pulled out of there. But snipers are still positioned in some buildings, so we hear. And Israel keeps bombing places they’ve evacuated. Like Khan Younis. Majeda, my friend of over 20 years, takes me to Khan Younis to see the grim remains of her beloved city, her house and neighborhood. This once vibrant ancient town of multi-storied family homes, gardens, color, music, restaurants, souqs, shops and cafés has been transformed into a gray landscape of rubble, chewed up roads, crushed cars, decaying bodies, emaciated animals, dead animals and dust so thick it simply cannot settle. You breathe it in as you walk through this architecture of colonial jealousy, hatred, supremacy and greed. Majeda points to an area of white ash:
This is where the family books were. Strange how small the ash pile is for so many hundreds of books.
I know she’s not just talking about the number of those books, but the vast world they contained. These weren’t ordinary books. The novels and usual sort were in another room, in another ash pile. These books were precious and irreplaceable handwritten texts. Majeda comes from a prominent family that held positions of authority and kept social and legal records over centuries of contiguous life in that ancient city: land purchases, birth and death records, family disputes, marriages, crimes, money accounts, food stocks, wars and more. Leatherbound and stacked on the shelves of their family home, those books had been a family anchor to a fabled history that Zionists covet and claim as their own. Only by burning our lived history can foreigners replace it with their biblical mythos and fantasy. My friend points to a fallen tree trunk splayed across what used to be the entrance to her house, where most of the ancient tile is thankfully still intact and can be salvaged. She says:
This was a Christmas tree my dad planted about 30 years ago.
They’re Muslim, but like most Palestinian Muslims, she loves and celebrates Christmas. My friend asks me:
How long do you think it would take to rebuild the city if we had all the money and materials we need?
She poses the same question to everyone who has witnessed the unimaginable destruction I saw. A year, I think. She insists:
No, I think I can rebuild my house in six months.
I had given her the wrong answer. But she agrees it will take decades to restore their garden. Lemon, olive, peach, clementine and orange trees take at least that long to mature.
But look!
She points to a green stem and leaf sprouting from the charred remnants of a bombed tree. This ordinary manifestation of ordinary botanical cycles feels like a miracle. To her (and I admit to me, too), it is a promise that Gaza’s native life will return. It will sprout from death, because the colonizer’s bombs cannot reach the depths of her people’s roots, no matter how much of us they burn, kill or break.
I will return to Gaza
Khaled El-Hissy, Electronic Intifada, Apr 24 2024
Chemotherapy is a necessary evil. A friend of mine who survived cancer told me that. Chemotherapy kills every cell within you, cancerous or not. It doesn’t spare any cells in your body. Since I began treatment for cancer, I have become thin. And I feel vulnerable. I am focused on a battle for survival. And I am not backing down in the face of cancer. Instead, I am pushing through the pain. Telling the world my story is part of my battle. I will never stop telling the world about how Israel has killed people that I loved. They included my dear friend Mohammed Hamo. Nor will I stop telling the world how Israel has destroyed the dreams of people who are still alive. When I got out of Gaza during the current genocide, I initially promised myself never to return there. The difficulties I faced living in Gaza were enormous.
Before Israel launched its war in October, Gaza’s unemployment rate was among the world’s highest. It was extremely challenging for young graduates to find a job that offered sufficient income to sustain a family and meet basic needs like food. I had experienced life outside Gaza previously as I had traveled abroad. Ukraine (to which I traveled three times between 2012 and 2018), Turkey and even Egypt were incomparable to Gaza, which was accurately described as an open-air prison. Even before the current war began and my diagnosis with leukemia, I had already planned to leave Gaza without returning. The current war has changed me to the core. Especially after my teacher Dr Refaat Alareer was assassinated in December. When I finished my third year at university, something bittersweet dawned on me. Despite achieving good grades, I longed for more classes with Dr Refaat. I used to ask him whenever I saw him:
Is there a chance you’ll teach us another course? I really miss your classes.
“Who knows?” he would reply. Whether he could teach us more was a matter for his department at the university and its planning, he would explain. At the start of my fourth year, I visited Dr Refaat’s office and asked him for advice. I was applying for a scholarship and wanted to know what I should write in a motivation letter. He said:
Never forget to mention Palestine and share our culture with others in any program you’re going to apply for.
Dr Refaat repeatedly told me:
You’re a smart and brilliant student. But you don’t read enough. You must read more.
I could spend an hour discussing anything and everything with him. He never failed to answer my questions; he was full of knowledge. Literature classes had a reputation for being boring in our university. A lot of information would be discussed but it would focus on something narrow, mostly historical content. The classes taught by Dr Refaat were the opposite of boring. Students didn’t dare to blink during his lectures as they were afraid of missing a piece of information they hadn’t heard before. His lectures overflowed with knowledge. In a 50-minute poetry class, he would analyze each line in such depth that the ensuing discussions were mindblowing. Dr Refaat always encouraged us to be creative, to think outside the box. His methods of teaching were distinctive. Throughout his courses, Dr Refaat went beyond the curriculum to enrich our knowledge with lessons on various aspects of writing, history, culture, religion, translation and most importantly Palestine. I never saw a professor use memes as a method of teaching. He loved memes. He made us love them too. Sometimes we would feature him in our memes and he would love that.
He always told us to come to class without doing any research on the next poem. We would just read the poem and discover it in the class. It was difficult for him to do so. Sometimes he would be mad at us. It was not easy for us to understand an entire poem when we hadn’t done any prior research on it. But Dr Refaat believed in keeping things fresh. He never gave up shaping our creativity. He would reward those who were creative. Only Dr Refaat’s students knew how hard it was to get a bonus mark from him. I will never forget his facial expressions when he gave me one. He would say things like “wow” and “excellent.” It wasn’t the extra mark that made me happy. I was happy because I had made Dr Refaat feel happy. Other students had told me that was impossible. Making Dr Refaat proud and happy encouraged me to think outside the box. Dr Refaat kept writing even in the brutal nights of the current genocide. He pinned his poem “If I must die” on his Twitter account, reflecting on what people should do after his death and what message they should carry: hope. He loved teaching the works of William Shakespeare. And he believed in the immortality of literature. He always believed that when writers die, their words will never die with them. Eventually he became a story himself, an immortal one. He did not die in vain. He changed my personality and my perspective on life. I was one of Dr Refaat’s students. And I am proud to say that I still am one of his students.
Although Israel killed him, Dr Refaat continues to inspire me and all the people who knew him. Even with him gone, he is still teaching me. He is teaching me how to always be brave. He is teaching me that words are powerful. They defy death. He is teaching me to be generous, and offer help to others even in these times when I need help myself. It has been six months since I was diagnosed with leukemia. My hematologist told me that my treatment will take two and a half years. I am now determined that I will return to Gaza once my treatment is finished. My home was partly destroyed in October. If it is not fully repaired by the time my treatment is over, I will live in a tent. I will return to continue Dr Refaat’s mission: Never stop writing or encouraging other people to write about Palestine. I will return to tell his story and the story of my friends who were killed by Israel. When Israel killed Refaat, it created millions of Refaats. Each one of his students is now a Refaat. Each one of his friends is a Refaat. Everyone who loved him and still loves him is a Refaat. We will honor him by continuing his mission. We will honor him by being the voices of Palestine.
Genocide profiteer IBM wins big on EU funding
David Cronin, Electronic Intifada, Apr 24 2024
Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza during the current genocide has garnered many headlines. Few who have paid close attention to how Israel tests new technology on Palestinians can be surprised. Israel had previously signaled that its May 2021 attack on Gaza gave it an opportunity to experiment with AI. The proper response to those signals would have been to halt any funding of AI research involving Israeli firms and institutions. The EU has taken the opposite approach. In Sep 2023, the EU authorized a project aimed at realizing a future in which collaboration between humans and AI “takes center stage.” Participants in the project include IBM Israel, a subsidiary of the US-based giant. IBM has a long and ignoble history of providing technology to abusers of human rights. Among its past clients were the German government during the Nazi era and South Africa’s apartheid regime. More recently, IBM has been awarded a series of contracts to run technology support centers for the Israeli military. Robotics are a core feature of the latest such center. It is a near certainty that IBM products can be found in Israel’s toolbox during the current genocide.
No questions about IBM’s ties to the Israeli military seem to have been asked by EU officials before they rubber-stamped the aforementioned project in September. I have seen a copy of an “ethics check” carried out on the project, named HumAIne, at the EU’s request. The exercise was one of box-ticking. It came to the conclusion that HumAIne had an “exclusive focus on civil applications.” The only significant recommendation was that “an independent ethics adviser must be appointed with the relevant accumulated expertise” so that the project could be monitored. The recommendation did not address IBM’s connections to Israel’s military. It merely referred to “ethical concerns” surrounding the project, particularly “the involvement of humans in the evaluation of AI systems.” While HumAIne was signed off by the Brussels bureaucracy before the genocidal war on Gaza was declared in October, the EU has okayed a huge number of new research grants to Israel since then. IBM Israel is among the recipients of those new grants. It is taking part in a project on data-sharing innovations, which the EU authorized in mid-November.
Ignorance is no defense for the EU’s lack of curiosity about IBM and its close relationship with the Israeli military. As IBM Israel has received 130 EU research grants with a total value of almost $93m since 2007, Brussels officials have had ample time to probe the firm’s activities. That they have chosen not to is symptomatic of a “see no evil” attitude which prevails. In late February, a group of EU staff sent a letter to Johannes Hahn, the European commissioner for budget and administration. It expressed strong disquiet at how the EU institutions had expressed support for and maintained close relations with Israel. After pointing out that the International Court of Justice had accepted there is a plausible case that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention, the letter raised concerns that EU staff could be complicit in the Gaza genocide. It urged that the EU’s in-house lawyers prepare advice for staff working in or with the Middle East on how they can avoid being held liable for complicity in genocide. Although it is nearly two months since the letter was sent, Hahn has still not responded to it. When I contacted his spokesperson this week, I was told that Hahn “takes note” of the letter and “an answer is in preparation.” The cavalier nature of that brief comment is instructive. Europe’s political elite is continuing to caress Israel against the backdrop of a holocaust in Gaza.
Roundtable: 200 days of genocide and resistance; campuses fight back
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Electronic Intifada, Apr 24 2024
Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has now passed 200 days, with no end in sight. Despite suffering and horror beyond description, the resistance on the ground remains determined and strong – denying Israel any strategic achievement. We were joined by our contributor Abubaker Abed, who described his experience of relentless Israeli bombing close to his home in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. Jump to Abubaker Abed’s segment here.
Meanwhile, there is no let up in global solidarity and protest against government and institutional complicity with Israel’s crimes. Right now, across the US, students and faculty are facing repression and reprisals, while Congress smears, investigates and threatens them for speaking out and standing up against the genocide. At New York University, police arrested more than 130 students and faculty late Monday night, in an attack on campus anti-genocide protesters reminiscent of the era of the US war on Vietnam. Also on Monday, Harvard University ordered members of the campus Palestine Solidarity Committee to “cease all organizational activities for the remainder of the Spring 2024 term,” or risk permanent expulsion.
Early Wednesday morning, Columbia University administrators threatened another NYPD raid and even the National Guard, as ‘Minouche’ Shafik, the university’s president, presses on with her violent crackdown. Shafik called the police on her students last week after suspending many of them and expelling them from their housing, prompting the university’s senate to take up a resolution of censure against her that may come to a vote on Wednesday. We were joined by Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor at Columbia who is one of three faculty members attacked and smeared during congressional testimony by Shafik last week. During the testimony, Shafik engaged in a harsh and bitter attack on Abdou, joining hardline pro-Israel lawmakers in distorting his words and vowing that he would never teach at Columbia again. Jump to Mohamed Abdou’s segment here.
In our second hour, Jon Elmer guided us through the latest videos from the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank as well as a series of operations from southern Lebanon by Hizballah. Jump to Jon Elmer’s segment here.
Jon, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and I discussed Israel’s threats of a full ground invasion into Rafah and other regional developments. Jump to the group discussion here. And I began the program with a news report, including stories by Maureen Clare Murphy on Israel’s use of torture to extract forced confessions against UNRWA and the arrest of Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in Jerusalem, and stories by Tamara Nassar on the escalating violence by IOF and Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Jump to the news report here.
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