The Free

Worse Than You Can Imagine | West plotted with Israel to Starve 2.3m in Gaza! – Craig Murray

from thefreeonline on April 27 ’24 by Craig Murray

It’s impossible the US, Canada, Australia, Germany etc all cancelled UN aid to Gaza within 24 hours of Israel’s false accusations of Hamas

Governments cannot take big decisions extremely quickly except in the most extreme of circumstances. There are mechanisms in all states that consider policy decisions, weigh them up, involve the various departments of the state whose activities are affected by that decision, and arrive at a conclusion, though not necessarily a good one.

The decision to stop aid funding to UNRWA was not taken by numerous Western states in a single day.

In the UK, several different government ministries had to coordinate. Even within only a single ministry, the FCDO, views would have to be coordinated through written submissions and interdepartmental meetings between the departments dealing with the Middle East, with the United Nations, with the United States, with Europe and then of course between the diplomatic and development wings of the ministry.

That process would include seeking the views of British Ambassadors to Tel Aviv, Doha, Cairo, Riyadh, Istanbul and Washington and to the United Nations in Geneva and in New York.

It is not necessarily a lengthy process but it is not a day’s work, and nor would it need to be. There was no practical impact to making the announcement of cutting UNRWA funding a day sooner or a day later.

Consider that the parallel process had to be completed in the United States, in Canada, in Germany, in Australia and in all the other Western powers that contributed to starvation in Gaza by cutting aid to UNRWA.

All of these countries had to go through their procedures, and it could only be by prior coordination – weeks in advance – between these states that they announced all on the same day the destruction of the life support system for Palestinians, then in absolute need.

And then consider that we now know for certain that the Israelis had produced no evidence whatsoever of UNRWA complicity in Hamas resistance, on which these decisions in all those states were allegedly based.

I have no doubt at all that the Western political elite, paid tools of the zionist machine, are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of Gaza at a much deeper level than the people have yet understood. The refusal by Starmer and Sunak to contemplate ending arms sales and military support to Israel is not due to inertia or concern for the arms industry. It is that they actively support the destruction of the Palestinians.

The coordinated decision of the Western nations to fast track famine by stopping UNRWA funding was announced within an hour, following the ICJ ruling that Gazans were at immediate risk of genocide, and drove from the media headlines the adverse ruling against Israel.

This sent the clearest signal in response that the Western powers would not be stopped from the genocide by international law or institutions.

Verso and other publishers are offering free ebooks in solidarity with pro-Palestine campus protests..

As students organize and resist to demand action and justice for Palestinians, publishers are offering free books on Palestine, protest, and more, in solidarity. Verso has seven ebooks available for download, including a case for sanctions against Israel, a collection on 2011’s Occupy movement, and a compendium of revolt and resistance.

Verso also collected a list last year of free resources, including books, interviews, and podcasts.

Haymarket Books has a series of books available for free, including Light in Gaza, a collection of writing by Gazans on “their dreams, fears, and aspirations.” Haymarket also organized Until Liberation, a series of events at the end of last year that are all available to watch.

Both Verso and Haymarket collaborated on an essay collection released in December, From The River To The Sea, which includes personal testimonials, essays, and interviews for a free Palestine, and “provide[s] important grounding for the urgent discussions taking place across the Palestine solidarity movement.”

Seven Stories Press is also offering a free, two-volume history of student resistance in the last 20 years. The author Mark Boren writes of his collection: “The explosion of protests in the world has shown us that there are millions of people—many of them young and altruistic—who are willing to stand up to forces of oppression, to risk their bodies, their freedom, and their lives to make the future better than the past, and that is humbling, inspiring, and hopeful for the future.”

If you’re looking for more resources and more to read, In These Times has a great list of digital resources for a free Palestine which includes the Palestinian Museum’s digital archives and an expansive list of zines and books from Publishers for Palestine.

There’s lots to read, but even more to do: Jewish Voice for Peace and The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights have lots of ways to take action right now.

free books Haymarket Books Palestine

Refaat Alareer’s daughter and grandchild have been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Shaimaa Alareer, an accomplished Palestinian illustrator and the eldest daughter of the murdered poet Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in the Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City earlier today. The attack also claimed the lives of her husband, Mohammed Siyam, an engineer, and their infant son, Abdul Rahman.

Up until his death (in a targeted Israeli airstrike on December 7), Refaat Alareer was a beloved poet, professor, and activist who taught literature at the (now destroyed) Islamic University of Gaza.

Alareer was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack and dedicated to creating “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”

Through his popular Twitter account, “Refaat in Gaza,” Alareer vehemently condemned the ongoing atrocities committed against his people by Israeli forces, as well as the successive U.S. administrations that enabled them.

In the months since his death, Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” has become both a source of solace and a rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of people around the world—people who hope, as Refaat and his daughter hoped, to someday see an end to the decades-long subjugation and slaughter of the Palestinian people.

Less known than the words of the poem themselves is the fact that Refaat wrote “If I Must Die” for Shaimaa. As he detailed in his introduction to Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014):

Now when I tell my daughter stories, I usually have in mind the generous Jewish hosts in Atlanta, whose five-year-old sweet daughter, Viola, kept asking me about optical illusions. I never gave Viola an answer to her question, because every time she asked it, my mind went to Shymaa, wishing she and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children had not been deprived by Israel of their right to live a decent life.

Sometimes I think we may one day find it in our hearts to forgive Israeli leaders (when, among other things, occupation ends, apartheid is abolished, justice prevails, equal rights are guaranteed to all, refugees return, and reparations are made), but I do not think we will ever forgive them for not allowing our children to live a normal life, to ask about optical illusions rather than who was killed and why and whether that noise was an Israeli bomb or a resistance rocket.

I want my children to plan, rather than worry about, their future and to draw beaches or fields or blue skies and a sun in the corner, not warships, pillars of smoke, warplanes, and guns.

Hopefully, the stories of Gaza Writes Back will help bring my daughter Shymaa and Viola together and give them consolation and solace to continue the struggle until Palestine is free. Until then, I will continue telling her stories.

If I Must Die

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

Refaat’s first grandchild, the infant boy he didn’t get the chance to meet, will never look to the sky for a kite again. Nor will the 15,000 other children killed in Gaza in the past six and a half months.

Shaimaa will never again find comfort in her late father’s words, or pass on his stories, or read his poems aloud to her husband and baby in rare moments of calm.

There will be no normal lives for those maimed and traumatized children left behind in Gaza’s ruins.

No optical illusions for them to pore over.

No tales to tell but this horror story, the ending of which still seems so very far away.

Gaza Israel poets Refaat Alareer

Vandana Shiva: protect the Earth, defend Human Rights and Justice /Eng/Portugués… video..

from thefreeonline on 26th April 2024 by Deutsche Welle dw.com

The link between predatory capitalism and the destruction of nature.

Activist Vandana Shiva, director of the Science, Technology and Ecology Research Foundation, based in New Delhi, India. Photo: Mindjazz Pictures

From April 2, 2024
Vandana Shiva:
“Hunger is created before the temperature rises”
In an interview, Indian activist Vandana Shiva defends indigenous peoples’ knowledge and food sovereignty as a way to combat climate change and rising food prices.

In Tierra viva: my life in a biodiversity of movements, the author revisits 40 years of struggle in defense of food sovereignty and against what she calls the link between predatory capitalism and the destruction of nature.

“Drink water, enough food and be able to breathe cleanly. These are the basic flows that give us life. And when attempts are made to privatize and close them, what is threatened is the very possibility of living. At this point, if we make a very honest assessment, a large number of our fellow humans, other human beings, as well as other beings on Earth, are threatened and experiencing an extinction crisis,” states Shiva.

In an interview with DW, the scientist also affirms that Brazil needs to change the logic of large-scale production created by the globalized industrial agriculture model, giving way to organic agriculture as a way to combat rising prices.

“The mistake was betting everything on industrial agriculture, reducing agriculture to manufacturing, which uses fossil fuels and obtains raw materials. Globalization further reduces the food system. Before we ate ten thousand species of plants and now we sell corn, soybeans and cotton only because they are genetically modified and generate royalties for large companies,” she says.

DW: In her new book, Living Earth: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, she reviews environmental struggles that combine quantum physics with science, technology, and environmental policy.

How do you see the evolution of these issues since you began to get involved

Vandana Shiva: My values are the same. My orientation comes from the same things: protecting the Earth, defending Human Rights and Justice. When I started, there was a smaller lobby, such as the logging and mining lobby, among others. That was very little compared to what we have today.

Now, as globalization and neoliberalism have emerged, we have reached the point where large corporations want to control all life on Earth through standards and genetically modified organisms.