Peace

We have been writing annual Christmas messages of peace, for human rights,
and relating sometimes what happened in the passing year for decades. Since
I returned to Bethlehem in 2008 these messages have been special. Since
founding the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS)
in 2014, we also added greetings from PIBS.  This year writing seems
tougher than ever considering the ongoing and unprecedented
genocide/holocaust occurring in Palestine. In the ten weeks before
Christmas, more than 20,000 civilians (>8000 of them children) were killed.
2.3 million people were denied food, water and medicines while all means of
life around them were systematically targeted. Palestinians (Muslims and
Christians) are literally starving to death and dying from lack of medical
care. 65% of Gaza residential buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged.
Israel also targeted schools, hospitals, clinics, churches, mosques,
bakeries, sewage and water facilities, electrical, communication and other
infrastructure.

 We local Christians cannot “celebrate” or do decorations while injustice

Shortly after the start of a four-day ceasefire in the war on Gaza, the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium, Pedro Sanchez and Alexander De Croo, appeared in a joint press conference at Rafah Crossing.

 While Sanchez described “what is happening (as) a disaster,” De Croo called for a “permanent cessation of hostilities” and for an end to the killing of children. 

 Equally significant, the two European leaders declared that “we may decide to recognize the State of Palestine, if the European Union does not”.

Israel continues to deliberately target residential buildings, hospitals,
schools, bakeries, flour mills, water storage facilities and other public
facilities. But they will nget to pause occasionally over the next few days
- like a rapist agreeing reluctantly to take a break occasionally. 6000
children were killed in the pointed genocidal campaign to drive Gazans to
Sinai in order to steal the natural gas off the coast of Gaza. The western
governments are still partners in the genocide even if they occasionally
start to speak of "unacceptable level of civilian deaths" (sicking language
for an ongoing genocide). Israel killed over 102 UN workers and 65
journalists to prevent the truth from coming out (largest number of
Jouranalists murdered in any conflict since WWII). The two wars go on: A war
of ethnic cleansing and genocide which is used to vent and give Israeli
soldiers the psychological satisfaction of murdering civilians because they
are losing the other war against the resistance.

There is an exchange of prisoners (as many as 150 Palestinian women and

The leaders of the world must assert common humanity and create a new path, a new map which is fair to all, and establish a new, peaceful coexistence which recognizes the inner equality of all.

We are now being presented, several times a day, with media examples of the effect of extreme violence visited on the captive people of Gaza.  The images are heartbreaking. The reality unbearable.  

Bodies of Palestinian families strewn like refuse along a road  that they had trekked as a path to safety. 

A car turns around at a checkpoint in Gaza, its occupants are hit with a shot from behind, from a tank and everything, the car and its occupants, disappear in a puff. 

A Palestinian journalist mourns his colleague, who only a half hour earlier, was reporting on air.  After work, he went home, a bomb hit, killing him and his 11-member family.

The video of his ruined house shows several children’s party dresses which lie amidst the rubble. 

The human family is in the rubble.

An ambulance convoy, filled with injured Gazans, under the supervision of medical

The subjugation and annihilation of innocent civilians, bombed into the dust of "collateral damage," does not support America, Israel or the West's claim for moral high ground and a path to peace.

On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bombed a Palestinian refugee camp with 100,000 inhabitants, producing a hellscape of casualties, 50 dead, 150 injured, with buildings in collapse at the periphery of  massive bomb crater.   The stated public intention was to kill a single Hamas commander.

There are two million Palestinians warehoused in the sliver of land 26 miles long and between 2-7 miles wide, a containment camp holding indigenous peoples of the region hostage, known as the Gaza Strip. 

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which is estimated to have at least 40,000 members.  If the ration of 50 -1 holds up, that is 50 Palestinians will die for every Hamas member killed -- then every single Palestinian in Gaza would be killed.  This is not without possibility, perhaps the colonizers’ plan.

“(Tutsis) are cockroaches. We will kill you.”

 Arabs are like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

 The first quote was a line repeated frequently by the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, a Rwandan radio station, which is largely blamed for inciting hatred towards the Tutsi people. 

 The second is by former Israeli army Chief-of-Staff, Gen. Rafael Eitan in 1983, speaking at an Israeli parliament’s committee.  

Israel had the perfect plan for Gaza - in fact, for all Palestinians, when it decided to redeploy its forces around the Occupied Gaza Strip in 2005.

 Despite statements made, back then, by Israeli officials that the 'disengagement' plan aimed at severing Israel's legal and other responsibilities from its role as an Occupier, the actual story was different.

Regardless of the precise strategy of the Palestinian group Hamas, or any other Palestinian movement for that matter, the daring Palestinian military campaign, deep inside Israel, on Saturday, October 7, was only possible because Palestinians are simply fed up. 

17 years ago, Israel imposed a hermetic siege on the Gaza Strip. The story of the siege is often presented in two starkly different interpretations. For some, it is an inhumane act of ‘collective punishment’; for others, it is a necessary evil so that Israel may protect itself from so-called Palestinian terrorism. 

Largely missing from the story, however, is that 17 years are long enough for a whole generation to grow up under siege, to enlist in the Resistance and to fight for its freedom.

It’s 10 p.m. at Montrose Harbor in Chicago. Kiko and Tamar help me step from the dock into the wobbly rowboat. Kiko rows us out to the Golden Rule and I climb aboard in wonder. Oh my God! This is it – the 30-foot, anti-nuke sailboat with a history going back almost seven decades . . . back to the era of atmospheric nuclear testing and the Cold War at its simmering height.

The Golden Rule: “Floating for sanity in an insane world.”

Freedom’s just another word for . . . blowing up your children? Giving them cancer?

Militarism is obsolete, for God’s sake. Its technology is out of control. The latest shred of news that has left me stunned and terror-stricken is this, as reported by Reuters: “The Biden administration will for the first time send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine. . . . It follows an earlier decision by the Biden administration to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, despite concerns over the dangers such weapons pose to civilians.”