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berternste2@diasp.nl
Bert Ernste

Gaza: Suspending UNRWA Aid Risks Hastening Famine

Human Rights Watch

Continue Funding as UN Agency Staff Is Investigated.

Governments should continue funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), given its vital role in averting a humanitarian catastrophe and the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, while the agency investigates allegations that 12 of its staff were involved in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. (...)

(Text continues underneath the photo.)

Photo of Palestinians in line for bakery
People line up for bread at a partially collapsed but still operational bakehouse in Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al Balah, Gaza, November 4, 2023. © 2023 Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images.

After Israeli authorities provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several of its employees in the October 7 attacks, UNRWA announced that it had “immediately terminated” the contracts of the employees identified and opened an investigation to “establish the truth without delay.” (...)

“The allegations against UNRWA staff are serious and the UN appears to be addressing them seriously. But withholding funds from the UN agency most able to provide immediate lifesaving food, water, and medicine to the more than 2.3 million people of Gaza shows callous indifference to what the world’s leading experts have warned is the looming risk of famine,” said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. (...)

Instead of withholding critical funds, the European Union and France issued statements clarifying that they intend to “review the matter in light of the outcome of the investigation announced by the UN and the actions it will take” and “decide when the time comes.” (...)

Shortly after the October 7 attack, Israeli authorities cut off essential services, including water and electricity, to Gaza’s population and blocked the entry of all but a trickle of fuel and critical humanitarian aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes. Human Rights Watch has also found that Israeli authorities are using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. (...)

Human Rights Watch has urged Israel’s key allies—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit, with impunity, widespread and serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians. (...)

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a multi-partner initiative that regularly publishes information on the scale and severity of food insecurity and malnutrition globally, issued a report published at the end of December concluding that the entire population of Gaza is at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse. (...)

As the occupying power, Israel is obliged to ensure that the humanitarian needs of the population of Gaza are met. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures on January 26 as part of South Africa’s case against Israel alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. (...)

“Despite mounting risks of famine and a binding order by the World Court in a case about genocide, Israel’s foreign minister has now announced that he will lead a brazen effort to shut down the UN agency most responsible for delivering lifesaving aid,” Kumar said. “Unless governments reverse their decisions to suspend aid to UNRWA, the main humanitarian channel into Gaza, they risk contributing to the current catastrophe.”

Complete article

> See also: The Long War on Gaza

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank

Gaza: Suspending UNRWA Aid Risks Hastening Famine

Governments should continue funding the UN Relief Works Agency, (UNRWA), given its vital role in averting a humanitarian catastrophe and the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, while the agency investigates allegations that 12 of the agency’s staff...

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berternste2@diasp.nl
Bert Ernste

The Long War on Gaza

The New York Review ($)

Over fifty-six years, Israel has transformed Gaza from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one.

(Text continues underneath the photo.)

Photo of destruction after bombardment
Palestinians in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, conducting search and rescue operations in the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, December 14, 2023

Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in retaliation for its attack that killed 1,200 in Israel’s south in October. But a number of critics, such as the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, have argued persuasively that Israel’s goal is less to vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction. (...)

The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that has taken increasingly violent forms over time.
In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves. (...)

For decades the pressure on Palestinians in Gaza has been immense and unrelenting. The damage it has done—high levels of unemployment and poverty, widespread infrastructural destruction, and environmental degradation, including dangerous contamination of water and soil, among other factors—has become a permanent condition. (...)

Israel has never known what to do with this tiny strip of land. From the beginning of the occupation, the country’s leaders recognized that Gaza would have to be pacified to preclude the creation of a Palestinian state—their primary objective—and minimize Palestinian resistance were they to annex the West Bank. During the first two decades of the occupation, from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the start of the first intifada, their preferred tactic was controlling Gaza’s economy. (...)

The first intifada made it clear that this strategy of pacification had failed. Improved living standards could no longer compensate for the absence of freedom. (...)

That year [2007] Israel imposed a blockade that severely limited both trade with Gaza and the entry of specific food products into the Strip. But the blockade—now in its seventeenth year—is only a more extreme form of measures that were already in place. (...)

Early in 1991—before Hamas started launching rockets and orchestrating suicide bombings—Israel began restricting and periodically blocking the movement of workers to and from Gaza, as well as the trade upon which its small economy disproportionately depended. (...) In January 1991 Israel canceled the general exit permit that made it possible for Palestinians to move freely through Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (...)

The cancellation of the general exit permit marked the start of Israel’s closure policy. (...) As B’Tselem, another rights group focused on the West Bank and Gaza, has put it, “Isolating Gaza from the rest of the world, including separating it from the West Bank, is part of a longstanding Israeli policy.”

This policy of separation and containment became more explicit in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. In 1994 Israel built a fence around Gaza, the first of several enclosures. (...)

In 2005 Israel “disengaged” from the Strip, removing all of its settlements and military forces. Israeli officials have since argued that this formally ended the country’s occupation of Gaza. According to international law, however, Israel remains an occupier, as it maintains “effective control” over Gaza’s borders (except for Rafah, which Egypt controls), sea access, airspace, and population registry. (...)

Another crucial effect of Israeli policy—more noticeable after Hamas came to power in 2007. (...) Israel in effect recast its relationship with Gaza from occupation to warfare, as evidenced by the numerous deadly assaults it launched on the territory over the past seventeen years—among them Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Hot Winter (2008), Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), and Operation Shield and Arrow (2023). (...)

Under this new approach, Israel dispensed altogether with the notion that Gaza could have a market economy. “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza,” US officials wrote from Tel Aviv in November 2008, “Israeli officials have confirmed … on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” More specifically, they aimed to keep it “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” (...)

Since 2010, Israel has periodically eased restrictions, but the blockade has nonetheless almost entirely destroyed Gaza’s economy. On the eve of the current conflict, unemployment was at 46.4 percent. (In 2000, before the blockade, it was at 18.9 percent.) Approximately 65 percent of the population was food-insecure, meaning they could not safely access enough nutritious food to meet their dietary needs, while 80 percent required some form of international assistance to feed their families. (...)

Gaza could only experience relief, not progress. (...) “The West Bank and Gaza are now almost completely delinked,” a World Bank report stated in 2008, “with Gaza starkly transforming from a potential trade route to a walled hub of humanitarian donations.” (...)

Israel has, in other words, created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem. (...)

For the past ten weeks, with the exception of a one-week “humanitarian pause,” Gaza has been under a total siege; Israel has virtually halted the entry of fuel and restricted the entry of food, among other critical necessities. (...)

Complete article ($)

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank

The Long War on Gaza | Sara Roy

Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in

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andreas_geisler@diaspora.glasswings.com
Andreas Geisler

The importance of camaraderie.

The wage-earners are a democratically significant group.

The employers are not a democratically significant group.

But the employers control almost all media. They try to create division.
Between have-jobs and have-nots. Between high-earners and low-earners.
Between young and old.
Between even slightly different demographics.

If we, in general, get suckered into that, we're just handing power over to fascists.

Fascism is a movement for employers to get wage-earners so deeply infected with hate for other groups that they will start voting agains their own best interests to spite the Others.

The only antidote (apart from crowd-sourced and Union-supported media) is solidarity.

An engineer who earns 10 times what you earn is not your enemy, nor are you hers. That split is artificial, created by her employer and yours, working in perfect unison.

Don't be a sucker. If you are a wage-earner, have solidarity with all wage earners, because you have common interests and you need to work together to get them covered.

Also: Have solidarity with the unemployed, because their situation is being used to pressure you into giving up your rights - if the unemployed are OK, that's more power to you.

Have solidarity with all groups, whether ethnic, racialized, age-based, location-based. Animosity with the next town over is the most basic kind of the divide-and-conquer plan.

But do not appease the ones who have fallen into fascism.

Turn them around if you can spot a chance to do so, but otherwise shut them down. Don't fret over losing a few, they have been poisoned and if the best you can do is keeping them from doing more harm, so be it.

Be a comrade, even if you are not a communist or anarchist or even particularly opposed to commercialism, even if you're naturally cranky, even if you are oppressed by people who should be your ally - the very first step is to not fall for it yourself.

#Solidarity
#bluecollar
#whitecollar
#divideandconquer
#employment
#unemployment

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prplcdclnw@diasp.eu
David

The Secret History of How the Super-Rich Have Kept the Working Class Out of Work

Tim Gurner, Australian multimillionaire

https://theintercept.com/2023/09/23/tim-gurner-speech-unemployment/

“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” Gurner said. “There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy.”

#tim-gurner #rich-people #wealthy-people #the-wealthy #wealth-inequality #wealth-and-income-inequality #employment #unemployment #labor #labor-unions #labor-power #multimillionaire #multimillionaires #ruling-class #working-class #class-warfare

The Secret History of How the Super-Rich Have Kept the Working Class Out of Work

In a viral speech, the Australian multimillionaire argued for more unemployment as a corrective to workers’ attitudes toward employers.

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faab64@diasp.org
Farhad A

#Cuba is teaching the world lessons in #sustainability

Cuba is showing resilience and plenty of lessons to learn about tough times, gardening and humanitarianism — and it all starts with food security.

Along with the realization that climate change will affect the planet through rising sea levels, #flooding, #fires, #droughts, #hurricanes, #tornadoes and irregular wind patterns also comes the realization that food security will need to be a priority. Innovative models of #agriculture will need to be practiced for other reasons as well.

The sudden #coronavirus pandemic alert is another strong reminder that food security and sustainability help create a more resilient society all round. For now, Canadians are largely worried about limiting the spread of the #virus, or getting home safely from other countries. As days of isolation turn into weeks, remote work or #unemployment becomes a reality for most, and spring arrives, we may soon wonder why we have not turned our back- and front-yards into food gardens sooner.

#WeDontHaveTime #Politics #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency #TomorrowIsTooLate #GlobalWarming #Environment

https://rabble.ca/columnists/cuba-teaching-world-lessons-sustainability

Cuba is teaching the world lessons in sustainability

Along with the realization that climate change will affect the planet through rising sea levels, flooding, fires, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and irregular wind patterns also comes the realization that food security will need to be a priority....

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olladij@diaspora.permutationsofchaos.com
olladij

The Russian aggression undermines the achievements of Ukrainian feminists in the struggle against political and social #oppression. In the occupied territories, the Russian #army uses mass rape and other forms of gender-based #violence as a #military strategy. The establishment of the Russian regime in these territories poses the threat of criminalizing #LGBTIQ+ people and decriminalizing domestic violence. Throughout #Ukraine, the problem of domestic violence is becoming more acute. Vast destruction of civilian infrastructure, threats to the #environmental, #inflation, shortages, and population displacement endanger social reproduction. The #war intensifies gendered division of #labor, further shifting the #work of social #reproduction – in especially difficult and precarious conditions – onto #women. Rising #unemployment and the neoliberal government’s attack on labor rights continue to exacerbate social problems. Fleeing from the war, many women* are forced to leave the country, and find themselves in a vulnerable position due to barriers to housing, social infrastructure, stable income, and medical services (including contraception and #abortion). They are also at risk of getting trapped into #sextrafficking.

https://commons.com.ua/en/right-resist-feminist-manifesto/ #austerity #imperialism #feminism

“The right to resist.” A feminist manifesto

Manifesto calling for feminists around the world to support the resistance to imperialist aggression in Ukraine.

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tpq1980@iviv.hu
T Q

Do citizens of #European Union countries know their supranationale #government is #funding private companies in #Jordan to develop "#green" and "#renewable" #energy #infrastructure whilst the average youth #unemployment rate across all #EU nations is 15%, and even higher in some EU nations?

Look up "Catalyst MENA Clean Energy Fund" and see what EU citizen's #taxes are being used for. Did EU citizens #vote for this? Do EU nations not have problems of their own that require funding to solve? On whose #authority is this #wealth transfer taking place?

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