Gaza Unsilenced: How Israel has Committed Incremental Genocide for Decades

“We would not be here today, with unrestrained hubris in full display, had Israel, in 76 years of history, been held accountable at least once.” – UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese

I started a new teaching position in September, and there have already been a few mornings where I have stumbled out of bed mumbling to myself how much I hate it (the job, not the people). I would then jump on the subway, and read a few pages of the exceptional book, Gaza Unsilenced, and immediately be both humbled, and grateful for all that I have in that moment (loved ones, freedom of speech/mobility, access to libraries, hospitals, schools, the sounds of children’s laughter, museums, healthy food, safe drinking water, shelter, etc.). Feelings of dumb luck abound when I consider that I am not a target, at least for now, of a genocidal empire (unlike our brothers & sisters in Palestine), that despises the color of my skin, where I was born, or my religious background. Can you imagine? Gaza Unsilenced is infuriating and heartbreaking, but also educational. Its contributors provide further evidence that Israel has been commiting, what historian Illan Pappe refers to as “incremental genocide”, for a long time. According to the publisher’s description, “During and after Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, voices within and outside Gaza bore powerful witness to the Israeli attacks—and to the effects of the crushing siege that continued to strangle Gaza’s people long thereafter. Refaat Alareer and Laila El-Haddad are distinguished Palestinian writers and analysts from Gaza. In Gaza Unsilenced they present reflections, analysis, and images—their own, and those of many other contributors—that record the pain and resilience of Gaza’s Palestinians and the solidarity they have received from Palestinians and others around the world.”

For those unfamiliar, Refaat Alareer (one of the creators of Gaza Unsilenced, along with Laila El-Haddad), was a Palestinian poet, writer, professor, and father of six. He was just 44 years old, when he was murdered by Israeli forces on December 6, 2023.
Click here to learn more about Refaat Alareer from Palestinian writer, and activist, Susan Abulhawa.
Click here to learn how Refaat Alareer, and his family members, were murdered by the IDF at the urging of people like Bari Weiss.
Click here for a recent post that featured Mr. Alareer.

Before I share more from Gaza Unsilenced, I wanted to provide a little more background on Israel from three of the most respected historians on the subject, Illan Pappe, Rhashid Khalidi, and Norman Finkelstein.

Illan Pappe

“I believe the status quo in Israel cannot persist because, from its inception, the “peace process” has failed to deliver any kind of resolution. Most people date the beginning of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” to the Arab Israeli War in 1948. But the conflict had been brewing for much longer. In the middle of World War I, the British government made the notorious Balfour Declaration, committing to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” in anticipation of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. However, as the victorious powers carved up the territories of the empire between themselves, they made a great many promises about granting peoples the right to self-determination, once they were ready for it. When Britain was granted a League of Nations mandate in Palestine, it stipulated a responsibility to safeguard “the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race, and religion” and to encourage local autonomy. From 1918-1948, successive British governments tied themselves in knots attempting to fulfill both promises at once: to create a Jewish “national home” while promoting self-government for Palestine’s existing inhabitants, many of whom were reluctant to cede parts of their territory to a Zionist project – a commitment Britain had made without ever asking what the Palestinians thought.”
– Illan Pappe, Israel on the Brink

Rashid Khalidi

“More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement, sovereignty and complete control of Palestine. With Britain’s unstinting support, these aims suddenly became plausible. Some leading British politicians extended backing to Zionism that went well beyond the carefully phrased text of the declaration. At a dinner at Balfour’s home in 1922, three of the most prominent British statesmen of the era—Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill, assured Weizmann that by the term “Jewish national home” they “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine. Nor did it…Significantly, the overwhelming Arab majority of the population (around 94 percent at that time) went unmentioned by Balfour, except in a backhanded way as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” They were described in terms of what they were not, and certainly not as a nation or a people—the words “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not appear in the sixty-seven words of the declaration. This overwhelming majority of the population was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By way of contrast, Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a tiny minority, 6 percent, of the country’s inhabitants…The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.”
– Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

Norman Finkelstein

“Israel is a satanic state, and a lunatic society. Israel is the main cause of anti-Semitism in the world today…When Israelis see Benjamin Netanyahu, the bottom line is they see themselves, an obnoxious, self-righteous Jewish supremacist. That’s who the Israelis are. That’s who Benjamin Netanyahu is. So this notion that somehow he is the problem, no. If you look at the public opinion surveys, 50% of Israeli Jews say they support genocide in Gaza. It’s 50%. They were asked a very direct question. When the Israeli army goes into a city, the question was, when the IDF goes into a city, should it kill everybody in the city? 47% of Israeli Jews said yes. When they were asked in another survey, are there any innocence in Gaza? Remember, half of Gaza is children, okay, between 70 and 75% said, No Innocence in Gaza. That’s not Netanyahu. When they were asked whether they were concerned about starvation in Gaza? Over 80% said no.” – Professor, activist, and author, Norman Finkelstein
Click here for the complete interview with Norman Finkelstein and Myriam Francois.
Click here to learn how nearly half of Israelis support killing all Palestinians in Gaza.

“Israel hasn’t been suspended from the UN, other international foreign organisations, UEFA, FIFA, FIBA or cultural events. Genocide continues because it is normalised…Today it is the Palestinians. We are next.” – UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese

Gaza Unsilenced – Just World Books

Okay, so here are a few excerpts from Gaza Unsilenced that really stood out to me (most of the passages that are shared below have been published elsewhere as well).

I wrote a blog last year titled, Palestinian Courage and the Silence of our Friends, where I expressed great admiration for the courage, and steadfastness of Palestinians. After reading Laila El-Haddad’s piece, Re-humanizing Gaza, I now realize that I need to be even more careful with my words. Thank you Laila.

Laila El-Haddad – Just World Books

Re-humanizing Gaza by Laila El-Haddad

“We Palestinians from Gaza are frequently spoken of as heroes. We’ve grown accustomed to pats on the back and praise for our courage and bravery. But speak to average people in Gaza and chances are they’ll roll their eyes. Not because there isn’t indeed a spirit of steadfastness in Gaza; historically, it has been a thorn in the side of any army that dared to invade it. But such reductionist characterizations, well intentioned as they may be, assume no frailty and thus, no humanness. Even this most basic of human characteristics, undesirable as it may be, is denied the Palestinian of Gaza. Such depictions further the dehumanization of Palestinians. By failing to see Gaza as a polity with many debates raging, and many views being aired, we ourselves contribute to the dehumanization or un-humanization of Gaza. If the blockade persists, we think, “But they can handle that, right? They’re Gazan!” If the borders close we say, “But they must be used to this by now; the border always closes.” Instead of viewing Palestinians as human beings, we see them as abstractions. We have turned Gaza into a legend before the story has even ended. The simple truth is, people cope because they have to. In desperate and impossible times, people either survive or perish. Granted, the conditions Gaza is subject to are more extreme perhaps than any other on earth. It is a territory more surveilled, more enclosed, more perversely de-developed and debilitated than any other. One can’t help but wonder then, is it something about Gaza that makes it unique, where other peoples might have long perished or at the very least acquiesced? Are there some core values or social bonds that enable them to react the way they do? There are. And it’s precisely these things that Israel’s ongoing blockade intends to fracture: normality, basic freedoms, sustainability, entrepreneurship and prosperity. But Palestinians insist on existing, and simple everyday acts, like going to school or cooking traditional meals, become acts of resistance.”
Click here for the entire piece from Laila El-Haddad.
Click here to learn more from Laila El-Haddad from The Nation.

Uprooting History in Al-Maghazi (a refugee camp in Gaza)
“It is not the uprooting of the trees themselves that is the worst, it is the uprooting of our history.” – Abu Mousab from Al-Maghazi

A Brief History

“Sometimes referred to as the world’s largest open air prison, a modern Warsaw ghetto, or other depictions that attempt to convey the cruel reality that this small corner of the world, our home, has become by design, Gaza is a very tiny place. It has a population of just over 1.8 million that is growing at a rate of three percent yearly, the thirteenth highest growth rate in the world. Its land mass is roughly that of the city of Philadelphia’s, a third of New York City, with a population density equal to that of Boston. It is a place where every space and plane is surveilled, occupied, and surrounded, where Israel’s ever-buzzing drones have become a disquieting, omnipresent fixture of the likewise besieged sky. It is a place defined by political paradoxes and subject to hegemonic hypocrisy—a place where your freedom to travel, to learn, to farm, to fish, to marry, to live, to build, or to simply be are controlled by an outside power, who nevertheless claims to have relinquished that control. The modern-day Gaza Strip was carved out of a much larger British administrative swathe known as the Gaza District, which was connected without interruption to the rest of historic Palestine, and which was approximately three and a half times the size of the modern day Gaza Strip. As part of the Egyptian-Israeli Armistice Agreement of 1949, Gaza’s borders were redrawn to suit its eventual occupier’s colonial objectives, and its inhabitants—along with the hundreds of thousands who fled there for safety from invading Zionist militias in 1948—were sealed in and prevented from returning to their homes and their land, which in many cases were only a few miles away. This influx of refugees from other parts of Palestine tripled Gaza’s population overnight. For the next 19 years, Gaza remained under Egyptian administrative rule and control. During this period, the newly established state of Israel attacked Gaza ruthlessly and repeatedly, under the guise of preventing “infiltrators” from crossing the border (Palestinians attempting to return to their homes or reclaim their property), especially under the direction of a young Ariel Sharon and his infamous Unit 101. Between 1956 and 1957, Israel briefly occupied Gaza and summarily executed more than a thousand Palestinian men and women, an event that Laila’s mother, Maii El-Farra, who was 11 years old at the time, recalls vividly. In the early 1970s, Sharon, by then chief of the Israeli military’s Southern Command, hit Gaza hard in an attempt to crush the resistance in its refugee camps, bulldozing large blocks of entire neighborhoods to make way for army vehicles and deter future resistance, and burying alive many suspected fighters in the process. In 1967, Israel invaded and formally occupied the entire Gaza Strip, along with the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. Since then, Palestine has been suffocating under a brutally oppressive occupation. Palestinians have continually paid a heavy price for refusing to succumb to an alien invasion. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed, almost a million trees have been uprooted, and close to a million Palestinians have spent time in Israeli military prisons…”

The Human Toll

“We frequently hear Gaza explained in the context of numbers: this many dead, and that many living, in this large of an area. But what does it really mean when children are deliberately targeted while running for cover, or when entire families are wiped out as they sit for their evening Ramadan meal, or when the only survivors are too young to tell you who they are? When there are so many dead and so little electricity that little bodies are piled into ice cream trucks instead of morgues? When children under six years old have witnessed three separate assaults in their still extremely vulnerable young lives? How can we reconcile these scenes with the impenitent statements of Israeli talking heads about self-defense? Laila’s aunt, Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician and human rights activist who was working shifts at a clinic in Gaza City during the assault, has talked in a poignant matter-of-fact way about two such child survivors, whom she had happened upon. The realization dawned on her only gradually that she was treating unidentified children who had lost their entire families.

One story stood out in “particular, that of unnamed child “Number 6”:

He was around three years old and had identifying stickers on his arms saying “Unknown” and “Number 6.” I was shocked and immediately asked the nurses and ambulance drivers what his name was. They said no one knew, they’d found him in a mass of destroyed houses and he seemed to be the only surviving member of his family. “Doesn’t anyone remember where his house was?” I asked. They said that where they had found him, all the buildings had been destroyed and were mixed up with each other, and sometimes children were blasted from one place to another. So they didn’t know where he had been living exactly. And then I realized that he was Number 6, and that means there were five other unidentified children before him—and probably many more children after him. I stopped asking questions because I needed to get on with my work.”

Gaza 2014 – Electronic Intifada

By some estimates, Israel’s use of firepower on Gaza by land, sea, and air during Operation “Protective Edge” (in 2014), was equivalent to the atomic bomb used in Hiroshima. Concretely, some 23,400 tank shells, 20,400 artillery shells, and 2.9 million bullets, or “almost two bullets for every man, woman, and child in Gaza,” were emptied out into Gaza and its people. These tank and artillery shells were no crudely made rockets. They were state-of-the-art, sophisticated ordnance, whose purpose is not to protect, but to maim and kill, especially considering they were being launched into densely populated areas. According to a report from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), during the 51 days of aggression, the Israeli occupation annihilated not only thousands of lives, but entire sectors of Gaza’s economic and social life. Twenty-eight hospitals and clinics were destroyed, along with 141 schools, scores of places of worship, and 60,000 homes. “Protective Edge” also inflicted billions of dollars worth of damage on vital civilian infrastructure such as water, sanitation, roads, electricity, and telecommunication. It is difficult to grasp what the fallout from all this means as Gaza struggles to rebuild: farmers without farms, students without classrooms, workers with no factories, fathers without jobs, children without parents, parents without children. An entire population was left reeling from severe trauma and a still unrelenting siege.”

Shahd Abusalama

Detainees on Hunger Strike Issue their Will as They Stand “at the Edge of Death” by Shahd Abusalama

“Despite the chains and the prisons’ bars and walls, this is a will from those who are standing at the edge of death to the guards of our homeland, Palestine. After leaving the isolation cells which are no longer able to tolerate our pains, illnesses and corroded bodies, from our hospital beds to which we are shackled by chains and guard dogs, from amidst the jailers who keep watching our heart monitors that may announce our death any moment, from the edge of death, we send our call which could be the last for some of us. It might be the time to announce our will before we embrace our people as dignified martyrs. Our call is our voice, our scream, our will. We are the administrative detainees who are heading towards immortality, towards embracing the sun of dignity which might mark at the same time, the end of the battle for dignity. We raise our voice, hoping that it will reach our revolutionary people. First, we call upon you to intensify your support of the hunger strikers who are not yet martyred; the fighters who fight our fascist enemy with their bodies deserve from you a stand of loyalty that prevents the continuation of our bloodshed which will never stop until the achievement of our just demands. Second, the pains of hunger damaged some of our organs but some organs must be still intact. As death is waiting for us, we declare that nothing will stand in the way of our sacrifices, even death. Therefore, we donate our functioning organs to the fighters, poor and oppressed people who are in need. We are waiting a visit from the International Committee of The Red Cross to endorse these donations. Third, we call on you to stay faithful to our blood and the blood of all martyrs who sacrificed their souls over the course of our Palestinian struggle. Faithfulness is not just through words, but through revolutionary practice that knows no hesitance nor weakness. Fourth, hold on to our historical and legitimate rights and never give up an inch of Palestine, from the river to the sea. The right to return is the bridge to our historic rights. These rights cannot be restored without resistance, which is the only language that our enemy understands. Fifth, don’t fail prisoners who remain alive after us, as those who sacrifice their freedom as a price for their people’s freedom deserve freedom rather than death. “To our dignified people in Palestine and diaspora, to the free people and freedom fighters worldwide, we will let our screams be heard despite the darkness of Israeli jails, which are graves for the living. To people of dead conscience worldwide, our Palestinian people will continue the struggle until victory. We bid farewell with smiling faces.”
Click here for the complete article by Shahd Abusalama.
Click here for a 2012 piece from Amnesty International, Starved of Justice, Palestinians Detained Without Trial by Israel.

Rania Kahlek

Incitement from the Top by Rania Kahleck

“While calls for extermination have been rampant both in the streets of Israel and on Israeli social media for months, the “death to Arabs” sentiment is not isolated to vigilantes. Take for example Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, a rising star in the far-rightwing Jewish Home party, who recently called for genocide by slaughtering Palestinian mothers to prevent them from giving birth to “little snakes.” Fast forward several weeks, and the United Nations is reporting an alarming rise in miscarriages and premature births in Gaza, where newborn infants are dying due to electricity blackouts that shut down their incubators. Another Israeli public official inciting violence is Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, who issued a religious edict declaring that it is permissible under Jewish religious law for the Israeli army to “punish the enemy population with whatever measures it “deems proper,” even if that means “exterminat[ing] the enemy.” Since then, portions of Gaza have been reduced to rubble in apocalypse-like scenes that look indistinguishable from the flattened cities of Syria. With all eyes glued to Israel’s destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip, little attention is being paid to the heightened levels of racism in Israeli society as demands for “death to Arabs” echo across the country with devastating consequences for Palestinians from Shuja‘iya to Qalandiya to Jerusalem to Haifa…”
Click here for the entire article from Rania Kahlek (Electronic Intifada).

Sharif S. Elmusa

Something Rotten in the Operations Manual by Sharif S. Elmusa

“Israel’s allegation that for Palestinians life is cheap has a long pedigree among Western imperialists. The words of General Westmoreland, quoted in the 1974 film Hearts and Minds about the Vietnam War, always stuck in my mind. Generalizing, the general opined, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.”…The need for “Orientals,” for barbarians, as a “kind of solution,” persists. Today they are the Arabs and Muslims, and the Israeli information section of the Operations Manual feeds on and into the latent racism. What is a human shield anyway, this alloy of the human and the technological? True, we are all cyborgs these days, with one prostheses or another; in the “human shield,” however, the human is grafted onto the metal, which makes it a strange coinage that works only metaphorically; human flesh is poor armor. Deploying children as shields therefore assumes that the Palestinians believe that the Israeli army is indeed a moral army that would be ever so conscientious in its choice of targets, cognizant of the children’s presence and their vulnerability, and fire its missiles and shells with utter refinement as to spare the children, and by extension the fighters. In fact, more than 60 percent of Gazans are refugees from numerous Khirbet Khizehs. Since 1948, they have been through small and big “wars” waged by Israel, through two uprisings, and two previous major invasions in 2009 and 2012. The Palestinians know only too well the long history of abuse of children and adults by Israeli army and security, which has been documented by first-hand accounts, journalists, and reports by human rights organizations. Here is how Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz on 24 August put it, “We must admit the truth: Palestinian children in Israel are considered like insects. This is a horrific statement, but there is no other way to describe the mood in Israel in the summer of 2014.” Did this piece of information come to the attention of Elie Wiesel before he wrote his eloquent advertisement, or did he prefer the bliss of denial? Still, why did the Israeli army finish off the life of more than 2,100 people, more than three quarters of them civilians, when its casualties were less than 80? Why kill 500 children and introduce to the vocabulary of war the “unknown child,” unknown because the members of his or her “family were all gone? Why wipe out entire families? Why did one soldier publicize on the Internet that he knocked out 13 children? Why did the navy willfully gun down kids playing on the seashore? Why did the air force destroy the sole electric power station and the greenhouses that farmers used to plant flowers for export to Europe? Why did Israel feel it must inflict this immeasurable misery on Gaza? Why did it do all this despite steady protests and appeals from so many people and from the United Nations and the Red Cross and numerous world bodies? What did the Operations Manual tell the officers to do? What types of “information” did it supply them with? Who are the barbarians?”

Refaat Alareer: Image – Electronic Intifada

Whitewashing Israel by Refaat Alareer

“The likes of my niece Raneem and little nephew Mohammed are purposefully being punished by Israel and the international community—first by destroying their houses and lives, and then by providing Israel with the impunity and excuses it wants, and finally by delaying the process of justice. They want these little kids to live in ruins and destruction. Ironically Palestinian children are expected to grow up and like Israel or see a future where peace can be achieved when the murderers of their parents and destroyers of their houses go unpunished and unaccountable. Unless Israeli war criminals are brought to justice and the occupation ends, my fear is that these children will grow up feeling that they were betrayed by the world. We owe it to them to change that vision.”

The book ends in silence with the names of the dead.
Thank you to Laila El-Haddad, Refaat Alareer, and all of the contributors to Gaza Unsilenced.

Israel is a Jewish Supremacist State with a Long History of Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocidal Intent

Albert Einstein

Many people still believe that the Israel-Palestine “conflict” began in 1948, and that Israel was up to that point, at least a rational actor. This is simply not true. Here are quotes from Albert Einstein from 1929-1948 on the subject of Zionism, and Israel:

“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people…If we are not able to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing during our two thousand years of suffering, and deserve the fate which will befall us…It seems to me that our beloved Americans are now patterning their foreign policy on the model of the Germans, since they appear to have inherited the latter’s inflatedness and arrogance. Apparently, they also want to take on the role England has played up to now. They refuse to learn from each other; and learn little even from their own harsh experience. What has been implanted into the heads from early youth is rooted more firmly than experience and reasoning.” – Albert Einstein (1929-1948)

According to journalist Robin Philpot, “As for the political ancestors of the current Netanyahu government, Einstein tore into them and their political parties, particularly in The New York Times. When Menachem Begin came to New York in late 1948, Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other Jewish figures in the United States published a letter denouncing his visit and the organization he led calling it “a political party very close in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and fascist parties.” One example they cited was the massacre of 240 men, women, and children in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Einstein would repeat this accusation until his death in 1955 (on Menachem Begin and other Israeli leaders): “These people are Nazis in their thoughts and actions.” Anyone who says this today in the mainstream media is immediately labeled an anti-Semite and banned from the same media…It is common knowledge that when Chaim Weizmann died in 1952 the Prime Minister of Israel offered the presidency of Israel to Albert Einstein. Less well known, however, is the reason Einstein gave for this refusal: “I would have to say to the Israeli people things they would not like to hear.” Even less well known is Ben Gurion’s statement: “Tell me what to do if he says yes! I’ve had to offer him the post because it was impossible not to, but if he accepts we are in for trouble. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are being accused of anti-Semitism or fired from their jobs because they dare to criticize the State of Israel, call it an apartheid state, and denounce the genocide of the Palestinians. May they rest assured: they are in good company, because if Einstein were alive today he would be in the front lines demonstrating with them.”
Click here for the entire article from CounterPunch that explains how Albert Einstein opposed Zionist colonization in Palestine.

“Zionism is the greatest form of spiritual impurity They have polluted the Jewish people with their heresy…if we place all the immodesty and promiscuity of the generation and the many sins of the world on one side of the scale, and the Zionist state on the other side of the scale by itself, it would outweigh them all. Zionism is the greatest form of spiritual impurity in the entire world. They are polluting the entire world. They have polluted the Jewish people with their heresy, Heaven help us.”
– Rav Yoel Tietelbaum, (1887-1979)

Gaza Strip 12.25 – Majdi Fathi, TruthOut

Updates on the so-called “Ceasefire” in Gaza, and other Notes

As per Truthout’s Sharon Zhang, “Human rights groups have reiterated that the “ceasefire” deal in Gaza hasn’t stopped Israel from continuing its genocide of Palestinians, killing hundreds in the 12 weeks since the agreement began. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said in a statement on Thursday that “the genocide in Gaza is not over.”…B’Tselem noted that Israel has killed 405 Palestinians and injured 1,114 since the ceasefire began on October 10 as of Monday, through continued strikes and military attacks. Just last week, Israeli forces bombed a wedding in Gaza, killing six Palestinians and wounding others as the couple sought to have a moment of joy amid the violence. Gaza officials have said that Israel has committed 875 violations of the ceasefire thus far.”
Click here for the complete article from Sharon Zhang.

Barbara Lubin – Image: Middle East Children’s Alliance

Rest In Power Barbara Lubin

As per the Electronic Intifada’s always excellent Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Barbara Lubin co-founded the Middle East Children’s Alliance in 1988 with Howard Levine in Berkeley, California, and dedicated her entire life to making the world better for children from the US to Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. She was an anti-Vietnam War activist. She fought for the rights of disabled children here in the states, helping to write legislation that would be the precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act. And she became a passionate and stubborn anti-Zionist activist who pissed off all the right people and never backed down from a righteous fight over Palestinian rights. She defied Bill Clinton’s murderous US sanctions in Iraq in the 1990s by smuggling medicine in her suitcases when no other US organization dared to. She and Mecca funded playgrounds and community projects in Lebanon, especially in the Palestinian refugee camps. And in Palestine, for decades, she worked with community activists, farmers, artists, doctors, and cultural workers to provide children with a life of dignity, joy, and safety. And personally, Barbara was a major figure in my life. She helped shape my politics and my principles, and she loved me like a daughter, for which I will be forever grateful. In a tribute to Barbara, the staff at Mecca says, Barbara’s life was dedicated to the idea that what was good for her kids was good for everyone’s kids. This led her to build community and solidarity beyond national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She leaves a profoundly important legacy not only in Mecca, but in the lives of everyone who knew her.” And Michelle Shahadeh, who is the former president of the Mecca Board and was a member of the LA 8, a group of Palestine solidarity activists who were persecuted by the federal government for years beginning in the 1980s, wrote that, quote, Barbara showed us what it means to choose humanity over comfort, justice over silence, and love over fear. She taught us that solidarity is not an idea, but a lifelong practice. We are better for having walked this path with her and poorer for her absence, yet richer beyond measure for what she gave us.”
Click here for a Barbara Lubin obituary.
Click here to learn more about Barbara Lubin’s work.

“Our generation has, for good reason, lost the belief, the conviction that we have the force of history behind us. Our generation believes there’s a good chance we’ll be defeated. There’s a good chance we’re not going to win. But you can only know one thing for certain: If you do nothing, it can only get worse. There’s that folk song, “It’s always darkest before the dawn. It’s this hope that keeps me carrying on. It’s always darkest before the dawn.” There’s just something in the human constitution that simply can’t do nothing. In the face of such death and devastation, you just can’t.” Professor, author, & activist Norman Finkelstein

The Bottom Line?

The US-Israeli Genocide in Gaza is one of the worst crimes in human history. Israel must be dismantled, and US & Israeli officials must be held accountable. In the words of Refaat Alareer, “Unless Israeli war criminals are brought to justice and the occupation ends, my fear is that these children will grow up feeling that they were betrayed by the world.” I don’t know how we get there, but I do know that the more people know, the more likely they are to act. I will be recommending Gaza Unsilenced to both students, and friends, for years to come.

Until next time…

Free Palestine!Artist: Carlos Latuff