Human Rights

On June 19, a large Israeli military force raided the northern Palestinian town and refugee camp of Jenin from multiple directions. Not only did the raid fail, it backfired, and it also created a precedent in Israel’s decades-long war on the ever-rebellious Palestinian region. 

Fadi, a Syrian teenager, with curly hair and an acne-covered face, has miraculously survived one of the greatest migrant boat disasters in the modern history of the Mediterranean. 

 Only 104 people have been rescued from a boat that carried an estimated 750 refugees after it capsized on June 13 in the open sea near the coastal town of Pylos.

 Scores of lifeless bodies have been pulled out from the water, and many more have washed ashore. Hundreds are still missing, feared dead, many of whom are women and children, as they huddled on the lower deck of the 30-meter boat. 

The Israeli government is at it again, actively discussing the construction of thousands of illegal settlement units as part of a massive settlement expansion scheme known as E1.

 Though Israeli construction in the East Jerusalem area has supposedly been halted under international pressure, the Israeli government has found ways to keep the plan alive.

Remarks by China's United Nations Ambassador, Geng Shuang, on the situation in Occupied Palestine on May 24 were impeccable, in terms of their consistency with international law.

 Compared to the United States’ position, which perceives the UN, and particularly the Security Council, as a battleground to defend Israeli interests, the Chinese political discourse reflects a legal stance based on a deep understanding of the realities on the ground.

May 15th of this year was the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) that befell Palestinians when the state of Israel was created, at least 750,000 Palestinians (about 75 percent of the indigenous population) were Israel forcibly exiled and became refugees. Some 530 Palestinians villages and cities were destroyed and by massacres and forced Between 1947 and 1949. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

Throughout the world, human rights activists commemorate this horrible and ongoing event. For the first time, there was a Nabka commemoration at the United Nations. Rashida Tlaib organized a congressional commemoration and introduced a house resolution “Recognizing the ongoing Nakba and Palestine refugees’ rights.” As the founding of their state by the U.N. is celebrated, Israeli law authorizes the Ministry of Finance to impose financial penalties on any organization or body that commemorates Israeli Independence Day as a day of mourning and withdraw their funding or support from the state.

May 11 marked the one-year anniversary of the murder of Palestinian America journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was killed by an Israeli soldier while wearing a clearly marked vest while on assignment to cover a military raid in Jenin refugee camp in the illegally occupied West Bank. To date, the U.S. has not held Israel accountable.

Our government is morally bound to hold Israel accountable for this and any other extrajudicial killings in Palestine because of the nearly four billion dollars of military aid our taxes provide to Israel and our unwavering disapproval of any action by the U.N. to hold Israel accountable under international law. It’s our responsibility as U.S. citizens, to hold our government to the highest moral standards. Israel must be held accountable for its human rights violations, and the US must stop paying for human rights abuses!

Israeli defense forces have killed at least 23 journalists in Palestine since 2002, according to UNESCO data, and hundreds have been injured by or targeted with violence. (1)

It is unclear why 100-year-old Henry Kissinger has been elevated by Western intelligentsia to serve the role of the visionary in how the West should behave in response to the Russia-Ukraine war. 

 But does the centenarian politician have the answers? 

 Every major global conflict that involved the US and its NATO allies in the past had its own state-sanctioned intellectuals. These are the people who usually explain, justify and promote the West's position to their own countrymen first, then internationally. 

 They are not 'intellectuals' in the strict definition of the term, as they rarely use critical thinking to reach conclusions that may or may not be consistent with the official position or interests of Western governments. Instead, they advocate and champion stances that are dominant within the various strands of power. 

Though the United States remains a strong supporter of Israel, there are some indications that the supposed 'unbreakable bond' with Tel Aviv is faltering, though more in language than in deeds. 

 Following the provocative ‘Flag March’ on May 18, which is carried out annually by Israeli Jewish extremists in the Occupied Palestinian city of East Jerusalem, the US joined other countries around the world in condemning the racism displayed at the event. 

Khader Adnan was not a ‘terrorist’ with ‘Israeli blood on his hands,’ as pro-Israeli propagandists have been repeating in the news and on social media. 

If the former Palestinian prisoner, who died in his Israeli prison cell following 87 days of an uninterrupted hunger strike was, indeed, directly involved in armed resistance, the story would have had a completely different ending. 

Armed Palestinian resistors are either assassinated or detained and tried by Israeli military courts to spend prolonged sentences in Israeli prisons, following brief trials that lack any fairness or due process.