To those who resist barbarism,

The past week has been one of the bloodiest in Gaza since October. While the mainstream press has preoccupied itself with one fascist’s bloody ear and another’s mental fitness, the Zionist occupation army has accelerated its butchery, committing successive massacres with two-thousand-pound-bombs that detonate in the sands of Gaza where displaced Palestinians set up tents. 

Our hearts are seared with the stories emerging from the besieged Strip: a young man with down syndrome torn apart by army dogs and left to die; children with a parasitic disease from the accumulation of pollution; political prisoners raped to death in Zionist dungeons; starving infants that resemble small mounds of bone and flesh.

Escalate for Gaza now. In our lives, we have not witnessed such depravity. There will be no end to the theft and murder as long as the Zionists are emboldened by their American patrons to continue their colonial war on Palestine. Beat on the doors of your local war profiteers, your complicit editors, your complicit universities. 

There is no shortage of ways to show up for Gaza. 

• Donate to this GoFundMe to help bring food and baby formula to northern Gaza. 

• Sign the Palestinian Youth Movement’s petition demanding that the logistics company Maersk cut ties with genocide. 

• Participate in the July 24 March on Washington to arrest the war criminal Netanyahu.  

• Join the CUNY Week of Rage to protest the filming of an FBI: Most Wanted episode at Queens College featuring a fictionalized Gaza Solidarity Encampment scene
  

We cannot stand by as Gaza faces annihilation. 

Unmask Maersk!

Maersk, the world’s largest shipping and logistics company, has transported more than $300 million in weapons components to U.S. arms manufacturers since October. Around a quarter of these shipments have been identified for Northrup Gruman, Woodward, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, the four horsemen of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

At least 68% of weapons sales to Israel have come from the U.S., with the blessing of President Joe Biden and his war cabinet, which includes Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon board member. Maersk guarantees a consistent supply of ammunition to wreak annihilation on Gaza.

Our comrades at the Palestinian Youth Movement recently launched Mask Off Maersk, an international arms embargo campaign to end Maersk’s insidious role in the transportation of weapons and weapons components used by “Israel.” 

Logistics companies like Maersk are the intravenous drip sustaining the Zionist genocide of Palestinians, regularly supplying the IOF with the most advanced weaponry in existence to decapitate Palestinian children and annihilate entire neighborhoods. By targeting Maersk, we can disrupt the flow of weapons to the genocidal IOF and build leverage against the increasingly isolated Zionist entity.

Stop Reading Libs

This weekend, Masha Gessen took to the pages of the New Yorker to effectively accuse the anti-Zionist left of rape denialism. The subtext of their racist new essay, riddled with Israeli pseudo-expertise and Zionist hearsay, is: “Believe Israelis.”

In a piece that purports to analyze rape as a tool of war, we hear nothing from Palestinians whose recent testimonies recount prolonged torture and sexual assault in Zionist prisons. “Some researchers have argued — or have viscerally understood — that any body found disrobed, or naked from the waist down, was the body of a victim of some sort of sexual violence," Gessen writes. Why does a “visceral understanding” not apply to the photos of stripped and blindfolded Palestinian men?

The lone Palestinian voice in the piece is taken from a podcast. Gessen identifies Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian as a “Palestinian Israeli academic,” her citizenship misused to imply that she, like the “leftist” zionists who figure later in the piece, is a special kind of dissenting “Israeli.” It is her freedom as an academic and as an “Israeli” citizen, not her freedom as a Palestinian, that is — for Gessen and for the New Yorker — at issue here. The utter narrowness of the American liberal mind is on full display.

Gessen’s anti-Palestinian bias shines through their assertion that the “leftist” Zionist newspaper Haaretz’s reporting since October 7 has been “unparalleled.” This is an unforgivable insult to the reporters on the ground in Gaza who have meticulously documented the occupation’s crimes while facing targeted air strikes, displacement, and famine.   

Gessen likens Hamas’ actions to the Serbian policy of mass rape of Bosnian women in order to argue that Hamas was pursuing a genocidal policy of mass rape on Oct. 7th. This is an even more ludicrous, offensive and less supported claim than the widely debunked — but still not retracted — New York Times story, “Screams Without Words.” In Gessen’s contorted view, Zionists are earnestly pursuing justice for Hamas’ “weaponization of sexual violence,” and anti-Zionists are cynical rape denialists. In reality, Zionist leaders are the ones “weaponizing” unfounded claims of mass rape to justify genocide.

Like most Americans who go on reporting trips to “Israel,” Gessen has returned with a new fervor for redeeming the Zionist project. Their final paragraph reveals a fatal misunderstanding about who, from which “side” of this “conflict,” will end up at the Hague. 

Keep Your Ear to the Ground

Earlier this month, the liberal Zionist outlet Haaretz published an investigation into “Israel’s” use of the Hannibal Directive, a controversial military policy allowing the IOF to murder its own troops rather than see them become hostages. On October 7th, Haaretz reported, the policy was extended to prevent the capture of “Israeli” civilians, too. This was not news.

In the immediate aftermath of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Palestinians in Gaza presented evidence and testimony that the enemy had killed their own people. The martyred poet Refaat Alareer tweeted about the use of the Hannibal Directive that very day. Pro-resistance outlets like Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss reported early and often about the extensive use of the policy on Oct. 7th.

Even “Israeli” military sources admitted they could not distinguish between “Israelis” and Palestinian militants, yet fired mortars and hellfire missiles at anything that moved. Survivors report that IOF attack helicopters killed “Israeli” civilians at the Nova music festival. The IOF itself released footage of its air force indiscriminately targeting vehicles fleeing back to Gaza. This is not the first time that the IOF used the tactic. Leaked audio from Zionist generals revealed its use during Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

Why does this matter? For over nine months, Western media sources have uncritically cited “Israeli” officials claiming that Hamas killed 1300 people on October 7th. This is a lie. So is the Zionist entity’s claim that its genocidal war on Gaza is about saving the hostages. Israel kills its own people. This war is about annihilation. Annihilating Gaza and its people at all costs.

Why do we wait for a Zionist newspaper to tell us what we already know?  

Read with us

We are all reading the two latest issues of the New York War Crimes. Our tenth issue published on Juneteenth, highlights the connections and historical solidarities between the struggles for Black and Palestinian liberation and features an interview with Afro-Palestinian reporter Lama Jamous, commentary on resisting the pacification of our revolt, continuing the Black Radical Tradition of the American South, and finding a basis for self-determination in the land.

Issue 11, published at the end of Pride month, presents queerness and Palestine through multiple lenses — from Huda Judallah’s 1989 speech, “Lesbians and Palestine,” to testimony originally published in Pinko Magazine from a “27-year-old queer” on being gay during genocide — these pieces are united by the simple true belief that Zionism must be destroyed.

Our Los Angeles chapter is reading the novels Dawn, by Sevgi Soysal; The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher; and Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad. Also, Alan Mikhail’s history of the Ottoman Empire, God’s Shadow. 

Our Philadelphia chapter has started a reading group for Wissam Rafeedie’s Trinity of Fundamentals. 

Our New York chapter is reading Hussein Omar’s essay on gay Israeli soldiers, Abdaljawad Omar’s essay on “the Hamas question,” and Trish Salah’s poetry. 

Our Toronto chapter is reading Esmat Elhalaby’s 2023 open letter, “No Palestinians Involved,” a forthcoming Queer Palestine zine (guest-edited by Eman Abdelhadi, Kaleem Hawa, and Jasper Saah) and “I Don’t Want a State, and I Never Did” by Ameed F., which pairs well with this issue of Palestine in Struggle, published by the Canada-Palestine Solidarity Association in 1976, when the PLO visited Vancouver to strategize around Palestinian statehood.

Our newly formed Popular Education committee is reading Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies, edited by Zeb Tortorici and Daniel Marshall; An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, edited by Dr. Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha; and Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik’s Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present. Also, the poetry of Trish Salah. 

The Labor committee is reading Kerry Sinanan’s evisceration of Adam Shatz’s counterinsurgent critique, Abdallah Fayyad’s careful intervention on the matter of Islamophobia vs. anti-Palestinian racism, and Natalye Childress’s latest report on PEN America’s mistreatment of incarcerated writers. Also, the International Labor Organization’s 2022 report on the situation of workers in the occupied Arab territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights). 

The Communications committee is reading Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Hamas for his new investigative outlet Drop Site and Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties, a collective project edited by Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin, and Francesca Burke.