Senate Israel/Palestine

wow, you basically answered your own question!

 

The US cannot easily stop what's happening in Sudan, but it can easily stop Israel. Why aren't we talking about the DRC? Western Sahara (whose annexation by Morocco was recognized by the Trump administration)? Myanmar? Other bad things are happening in the world!

EDIT: It should also be said that, in terms of the level of destruction and the rate of death, Israel's genocide against Gaza is worse than everything else. Support for and close ties with Israel also infects almost every institution in the US (and Western institutions generally) in a way it does not for many other conflicts around the world.

 

Pumas at someone's funeral: "why are you so focused on this guy? Don't you know a lot of other people died today?"

 

I don’t really think we just focus on something because of the influence our respective countries have on it. My country has essentially no influence on the situation, and yet people are very focused upon the issue.

I think, whether we like it or not, we focus upon Israel because they are western. Just like people in Europe focus upon Ukraine because it’s European, people are naturally going to gravitate and comprehend an issue differently if it’s more connected to them. South Sudan is very foreign to most people in the West, with very little cultural, political or familial connections on the whole. The issue probably should be getting equal coverage and concern, but it isn’t, even on the left, and that’s not because of the United States, it’s because of unconscious biases.

 

Senator Jack Reed (Armed Services Committee Chairman, basically always on the shortlist for Defense Secretary, a moderate/establishment Democratic Senator when it comes to foreign policy)... is calling for Netanyahu to resign. Which is a rather radical step for him.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/12/metro/us-senator-reed-says-netanyahu-should-step-down/



More information on Brown University agreeing to student demands... it's being put to a vote:
https://thehill.com/homenews/educat...divestment-vote-student-palestine-protesters/

Brown University’s corporate board will vote on a proposal to divest from Israeli interests, the university announced Tuesday, a major victory for student protesters who have taken over dozens of college campuses nationwide.

Protesters at Brown will tear down their encampment at the center of campus and cease demonstrations through the end of the school year as part of an agreement reached Tuesday, University President Christina Paxson said.

“The devastation and loss of life in the Middle East has prompted many to call for meaningful change, while also raising real issues about how best to accomplish this,” Paxson wrote in a statement. “Brown has always prided itself on resolving differences through dialog, debate and listening to each other.”

...

Brown, a member of the Ivy League, is the most prestigious school to reach an agreement with pro-Palestine protesters since encampments protesting the Israel-Hamas war cropped up on campuses nationwide last week.

The Brown protesters specifically demanded that the university divest from Israeli interests and have lobbied the Biden administration to cease military aid to Israel and push for a cease-fire in the war, citing mass civilian casualties in Gaza.

Paxson wrote that a group of five student activists will present their argument for divestment to the university board next month, and the board will vote on the proposal in October. She added that student protesters will not be suspended or expelled for their conduct.

Protest leaders celebrated the agreement as a victory in a statement Tuesday.

“Brown administration has conceded to students’ demand that the Corporation vote on divestment after years of tireless pressure from the student body, 61 student arrests, an eight day hunger strike and seven days of encampment,” the Brown Divest Coalition said in a social media post.​

An article on Student Protest strategizing...

I Protested for Divestment From Sudan. What Today’s Protestors Should Know
6 minute read

TProtestors rally at the pro-Palestinian encampment at Brown University as they await answers from their delegation who are meeting with school leaders on campus in Providence, R.I. on April 29, 2024.Joseph Prezioso— AFP/Getty Images
Ideas
By Scott Warren
May 3, 2024 1:11 PM EDT
Warren is a Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is co-leading a trans-partisan effort to protect the basic parameters, rules, and institutions of the American republic, and is the co-founder of Generation Citizen, a national civics education organization

As a former student activist, it’s been a surreal experience following the pro-Palestinian protests occurring at universities across the country. Almost 20 years ago, I helped lead national efforts across the country to divest universities, cities, and states from foreign companies aiding and abetting the genocide in Darfur, Sudan—the last effort that inspired massive divestiture action from institutions of higher education across the country. Despite our successful divestment efforts, the situation in Darfur is once again at a dire point, with a humanitarian disaster looming. This time, very few are sounding the alarm.

Looking back on our efforts to divest American entities from companies in Sudan, two critical lessons emerge: First, a targeted approach to divestment is crucial to any potential campaign victory. Secondly, divestment on its own, while potentially important, is ultimately an insufficient tool in materially changing the situation on the ground, especially without long-term, sustained activism and engagement.

In 2005, the genocide in Darfur captured the attention of thousands of college students across the country. Protesting a regime that massacred up to 400,000 of its own people through use of militia groups in the western region of Sudan, students organized massive protests in Washington, DC and their own campuses, pushed for congressional action, and engaged in acts of civil disobedience. Students also helped to lead a nationwide divestment movement, lobbying universities and states to pull their investments out of companies directly or indirectly aiding the government to carry out the atrocities. Ultimately, 35 states, including California and Texas, divested from Sudan, and over 50 universities participated in the effort.

I helped to lead national efforts as the Student Director for STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, and worked on successful campaigns to convince my alma-mater Brown University, the City of Providence, and the State of Rhode Island to divest their assets from Sudan. We engaged in a purposefully targeted approach, using research to determine lists of specific companies that were engaged in business activities that could be demonstrated to support and facilitate the Sudanese government’s internationally recognized genocidal actions and human rights violations. This list included Chinese and Russian oil and gas companies, as it could be proven that oil revenues helped pad the coffers of the murderous regime.

The divestiture efforts were also explicitly targeted at universities’ direct investments, which comprise only about 5% of most endowments. Indeed, in a case like Brown, the university was not directly invested in any of the companies targeted, but rather, put them on a do-not-invest list as a result of our efforts. The rest of the university endowment is invested in commingled or mutual funds (this reality did lead to students pushing fund managers like Fidelity Investments and Berkshire Hathaway to divest from Sudan). Recognizing that the primary responsibility of the investment office is to secure a high rate of return for fiduciaries, and not to make political statements, this targeted approach also enables investment managers to easily replace any divested assets with similar companies.

It’s difficult to speak to every university’s current demands for divestment concerning Israel, but focusing on Brown University’s campaign may be instructive. First, Brown’s response has stood out because the University Administration agreed to present divestment from Israel as an option to Brown’s Corporation, which is the equivalent of the Board of Directors. Given the vast number of universities that divested from Sudan, and in the 1990’s from South Africa, most institutions have a process in place to explore the financial action. Irrespective of their opinions on the merits of divestment in this case, it’s disappointing that, at a base level, most administrators are refusing to even explore these processes.

Read More: What to Know About the Global Boycott Movement Against Israel

Secondly, Brown’s campaign has been specific about its demands for divestiture. The students are not asking for divestment from every company linked to Israel (which is the unrealistic ask of Columbia University students) or even Israeli companies (which University of Michigan students want).

Brown Divest has stated its goal is “divestment from companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” In that vein, the group has outlined criteria to identify such companies, including those that provide products or services that contribute to the maintenance of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and those that provide products or services that contribute to violent acts. From this criteria, the students identified 10 specific companies that would be targeted for divestment.

This is not to argue that Brown should, or will, divest from these companies. But the process of identifying criteria, focusing on a university's direct investments, and presenting recommendations to the Corporation for a vote are all responsible actions by the students and administrators alike. This targeted campaign is the only approach towards divestment that has any potential for success.

Even if targeted divestment efforts are successful, the most important question, which remains currently unanswerable, is whether these campaigns would actually make a difference on the ground.

Despite our successful divestment campaigns 20 years ago, Darfur is collapsing yet again. Sudan’s military is engaged in a fight for power with the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group, causing the biggest humanitarian crisis in decades. There are concrete actions that the United States can take, including pushing for negotiations, engaging in targeted sanctions, and leading anti-money laundering measures. This time around, however, there is essentially no domestic political will for taking action. Student activism has died out for the cause.

It’s counterproductive to engage in conflict comparisons between Gaza and Sudan. Student activists today would argue that U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the Israeli government’s actions, whereas the situation in Sudan is less directly tied to our actions. Both situations, however, are tragic, and tens of thousands innocent human lives are being lost.

If student activists today want to make a difference in the situation in Gaza, there are lessons to be learned from our work in Sudan. First, if they want to be successful in divestiture efforts, the work needs to be targeted. And secondly, students must recognize that the work to push for a peaceful Middle East will take a generation.

I look at the protests today with a deep belief in the power of collective action and recognizing students’ rights to organize in the face of injustice. I also note that this issue is much more contentious than the genocide in Darfur, which was universally condemned by Americans. What is clear, though, is that both the protestors and university administrators need to change their tactics. It’s imperative that today’s student activists do not look back in 15 years with a situation in Gaza that mirrors, or is worse, than today’s morass.​

https://time.com/6974567/6974567/

 

@DarthPhilosopher While South Sudan has its own problems with internal conflict, it's (North) Sudan that has heated up. The fact is that the conflict there is not explicitly backed by Western governments and institutions like universities in the way Israel's genocide is. NYU students protesting their university that has a satellite campus in Tel Aviv makes sense; I'm not sure what they could hope to achieve by setting up an encampment for Darfur.

 

But we’re not just talking about divestment. Israel gets far more coverage and attention in every respect, from every quarter of Western society, even from left wing alternative media. Even the famine in Yemen gets far, far less coverage, and there’s Western involvement there.

 

Israel gets the coverage because they are a people that suffered the worst genocide of the 20th century and they turned around and ethnically cleansed a land.

The only time I ever see anyone bring up Sudan or Xinjiang outside Muslim circles, it's someone trying to deflect criticism and protest against the Israeli regime. It's often coupled with an attempt to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, it's never in good faith.

 

I have a couple friends that were involved with the revolution there that removed Bashir before--much like in Egypt--there efforts were superceded by military factionalism. The civil war there is really hard on everyone.

Also, Israel/Palestine gets the most coverage of all these situations because the region is ethno-culturally important. Both as a matter of many people's religious identities and historical American foreign policy, it occupies an outsized place in American imagination, whereas places like Sudan and Yemen are barely understood to exist at all.

 

Not just the American imagination, but pretty much around the entire world. If we don't fix this, the world will become a more dangerous place.

 

The way I look at it, every time we see footage of, say, Saudi Arabia bombing civilians in Yemen you don't have a large swath of people who are out in full force trying to defend Saudi Arabia. I can't think of a single person in western discourse who thought it was cool that the RSF is killing children in Sudan. Nobody went around and said "Kony's a cool guy" back in 2012. On a more personal note; I've had to spend relatively little effort to convince people here that Hindutva is a dangerous ideology in India. The fact is: the amount of stuff you're seeing is largely due to the amount of support Israel has in the West.

There is an insanely large contingent of people living in the West who do not believe that Palestinians are human beings with rights such as the right to life, the right to dignity, and the right to not suffer horrifying disfigurements. I have never in my life come across what appear to be normal human beings with normal opinions immediately transform into some of the worst genocidal scumbags possible the second they start defending Israel and talking about Palestinians.

 

It's because the first thing most Americans think of when we think of Palestinians is that they're terrorists, they hijack airliners, commit suicide bombings, etc. We don't see the bigger picture of how Israel contributed to this.

 

I think that’s a fair analysis of why it generates more discussion, but not necessarily why there is more coverage. Coverage is directly related to the interest people have in the issue, and there is no actual reason why the murder of one group is necessarily more ‘interesting’ to a viewer than another, besides the unconscious biases which we all have.

I don’t think Hindutva is necessarily a great example though. There’s large portions of the Indian community in the West who have positive attitudes towards Modi’s policies and ideology. The reason why it’s not as talked about in the West is because it’s seen as more foreign and complicated to the average Western audience, so they have no interest in raising it with people who are supportive of it. If India were a European nation I think there’d be a lot more discussion, with both non-Indians and Indians having strong opinions on the issue. I think the same can be said for Sudan and Yemen - they aren’t Western and generally western people have little familiarity with even the fundamentals of the issues or the conflicts, so they immediately tune out.

 

I wasn’t making a “other bad things are happening” argument. You missed it, unsurprisingly.

DP, my thoughts are the same: it’s because they are western or are considered western.

 

A judge issued a not guilty filing for the 41 students, my friend’s son among them, arrested last December at a protest for divestment.

 

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gaza-sexual-violence-men-boys-israel/

Apologies for how depressing this is. It took me a couple of days to get through this. Unfortunately, however, the Israeli government is victimizing people in a manner that others have before them.

 

Part of the thing the IDF does to captured Palestinian males is threaten them by taking picture of them in compromising positions to insinuate they participated in gay sex. This is to scare and pressure them into then being spies for Israel.

Obviously this very much helps create more homophobia, for you have an imprisoned population whose only interaction with queer topics is a state that uses LGBTQ to harm them.

 

Twitter suspended the account of a Jewish Interior Department staffer who posted her resignation letter over the Biden Administration's handling of the war in Gaza





Remember what I said about how the governments of the West simply have social media companies do their censoring for them? I am proven right every time.

 

This particular social media company is owned by a right-wing ideologue.

 

Vs the ones owned by left wing billionaires?

 

Whether it's Meta or X or Google, they all suck on Palestine.

 

Tech lobbies and weapon lobbies tend to favor military interventions in general. We saw the rant of the CEO of Palantir as just one example, but there are others.

Interestingly, while the finance people, on the contrary, very often rather oppose wars because they might be detrimental to the global economy, when it comes to Gaza they tend to side unequivocally with Israel anyway.

 

Seems weird to suspend her account, since they didn't suspend the accounts of the others who resigned. She's been reinstated anyway.

 

"Biden" plays Go while politicians play chess. Just as palpatine the puppetmaster played both sides of the war. The conversations in the Galactic Senate must have run something like all yours in this thread.

Edit

added 'in this thread'.

 

@KnightWriter