'Nobody's going to force us out'

   By Reginald Johnson 

 Lana Savoca was stunned.

 President Donald Trump had just announced that the United States would take over the war ravaged Gaza Strip “clean it up” and redevelop it as a new “Riviera” on the Mediteranean.

  At a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said the “spectacular” new development would bring new jobs, new housing and finally peace to the area. But he also said the people there would have to relocated and it was possible US troops might be used to assist in the operation, although administration officials later walked that back.

  “It’s really a shock to me. I couldn’t believe it,” said Savoca, a writer and Palestinian activist who lives in Greenwich, CT.

 “It’s a real slap in the face to see them sitting next to each other (Trump and Netanyahu) talking about Gaza and just prime real estate and how they were going to clean it up and how it’s destroyed now and how people can’t live there and trying to find a better place for Palestinians,” she said. “In other words, ethnic cleansing them and saying it in such a calm, methodical manner. I mean, I wish I had better words for it, but it’s kind of unbelievable.”

 Savoca, who lost over 90 members of her extended family during Israel’s brutal 15-month military operation in Gaza, said she was surprised by the President’s words because during his campaign Trump had expressed anger at Netanyahu for the way Israel had acted during the war. She thought he would have come up with a better plan for the future.

  Savoca said the idea of the Palestinians being forced out of Gaza is appalling and brings back memories of the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes to create land for Israel in 1948. This followed approval of a UN partition plan dividing the old Palestine, which had been held by the British.

 Palestinians call that period “The Nakba,”  which in Arabic means, catastrophe.

 “It’s just awful, these people who’ve been through so much, and now they’re choosing to stay, and they’re traveling back up north where their homes used to be and now there’s nothing but rubble and poisons from all the destruction and they desperately want to stay there,” she said.

 

Lana Savoca at a protest against the Gaza war in Washington, D.C.

                  

  Trump’s plan for a Gaza takeover has been widely criticized by leaders in the Middle East and also some in the West including Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Legal experts have also said that the US taking Gaza over and driving people out is a breach of international and humanitarian law.

 Despite the criticism,Trump has doubled down on his plan in interviews and in social media posts. While Democrats have attacked Trump’s idea some Republicans have endorsed it.

  Observers also worry that Trump’s proposal for a US takeover of Gaza and relocation of the Palestinians undermines the chances that the fragile cease-fire in place for the past several weeks can still hold. The truce put at least a temporary stop to a war which has taken 66,000 lives and left Gaza in ruins. World court officials have labeled Israel’s campaign an act of genocide.

 Another Palestinian who is sharply critical of  the Trump plan is Johnny Sakakini, who operates  Abby’s Falafel restaurant in Trumbull.

 “He’s got a mad dog mentality," Sakakini said of Trump. "This is barbaric. So much has been destroyed and so many killed and now America is coming to steal the rest. There’s no respect for anything. I don’t even know why the United Nations even exists, if America can come along and do whatever the hell they want and nobody can stop them.”

  “So basically it’s 1948 all over again in a different way – with American hands,”  he said. “Before it was British hands, now it’s American hands. Steal and grab land from Palestinians and expel them and keep them as refugees for the rest of  their lives somewhere else.”

 Sakakini, who grew up in the West Bank and then immigrated to the United States over 30 years ago, said the Trump idea is doomed to failure, because the Palestinian people will not be expelled.

 “They’re not going to leave, no matter what he does,” he said. “If Israel could not do anything for 15 months, with all the power, all the weapons it has engaged in, almost like nuking the place down, and we stayed, we’re not going anywhere, we’re staying. Nobody’s going to force us out.”

        

Johnny Sakakini, a Palestinian-American, at his restaurant in Trumbull.

  Harold Koh, Professor of International Law at Yale Law School,  told the BBC that the Gaza takeover idea  "is an astonishingly misguided policy proposal that would also be massively illegal.”

  “As a matter of policy. we have a President who’s proposing to fix the century-old Middle East problem by building a beach resort on destroyed property of people of color, who’ve been involuntarily displaced maybe even by the U.S. Army. It’s a bit of an Atlantic City solution to a serious and horrible problem,” Koh said.

 He added,  “The way that he proposes to do it sounds like forcible displacement which is a war crime, a crime against humanity and also an invasion of sovereignty and a violation of the right of self-determination which is a violation of the UN Charter.”

  Sakakini was asked what can be done at this point to help the Palestinians and solve the conflict with Israel.

  “What can be done is, leave it to the United Nations. The only way is for the Palestinians to have their own place, what it was in 1967 (prior to the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank) and Israel has their land. Just leave us alone, let us live in peace. Stop poking with us. That’s the only way,” he said.

 

 

 

 

The genocide must end

                                                 Commentary

    

            By Reginald Johnson

        

    How long will the world community stand by and do nothing?

   For five months, Israel has been conducting a brutal, some would say barbaric military campaign to punish the people of Palestine for the attacks of October 7, when Hamas extremists assaulted a music festival in Israel, killing over 1,200 people.

  Israel says their military operation in Gaza is only targeting individuals tied to Hamas (which is the governing authority for Palestine) but news reports say otherwise. Israel has carried out a carpet bombing campaign which has leveled apartment buildings, schools, and universities. There have been airstrikes as well on hospitals, churches, mosques, refugee camps, food centers and ambulances. All these attacks are war crimes under international law.

   At this point, more than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed.  The real fatality figure is probably a lot higher because not everyone has been accounted for, including people whose bodies are under the rubble of destroyed buildings.

 Another 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes.

 Israeli authorities have also blocked aid trucks from getting into Gaza, resulting in acute food shortages. UN officials say that more and more people are going hungry and cases of starvation have already been verified.

  A group of UN experts declared recently that “Israel has been intentionally starving” Gaza, and that “widespread famine” in the besieged enclave is “imminent,” according to a report in Mondoweiss.

  “We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so completely and so quickly,” said Michael Fahkri, UN Special Rapporteur. “Never in modern history.”

   Medical care in Gaza is also collapsing, as hospitals and health facilities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombing. This has led to people dying from inadequate medical care and disease.

 The death toll in Gaza could jump exponentially with the onset of famine and the spread of disease. Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of the global public health division at the University of Edinburgh, predicts that a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population --- close to half of 1 million human beings --- could die within a year.

 Almost on a daily basis, atrocities are being carried out against Palestinians, particularly in Gaza but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem --- territories illegally occupied by Israel for the past 57 years.

 On Thursday, at least 21 Palestinians were killed after Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of people waiting for aid in Gaza City in the same area that was targeted hours earlier, according to the Al Jazeera news service. In the earlier incident, the same food distribution point at the Kuwait roundabout, Israel forces shot dead at least six Palestinians, according to the report. Israeli officials claimed that it was actually Palestinians who were shooting at their own people.

 On Wednesday, Israeli forces attacked a food distribution center in Gaza killing one worker and injuring 22, according to the BBC.

 Also on Wednesday, in  East Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was playing with fireworks. Eyewitnesses said the boy posed no threat to the soldiers and was using small fireworks.

 On February 29, UN officials reported that 112 people were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on a group that gathered around a food supply truck in the early morning hours. In what is being called the "Flour Massacre,” a number of people were killed by gunshots while others died after being trampled by the crowd that went into frenzy after the gunfire erupted. Others died when they were run over by the truck that began driving away to escape the chaos.

 On February 15, dozens of doctors were detained and tortured after a raid by Israeli forces on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to the BBC. The doctors were forced to strip, were blindfolded, forced to remain in a kneeling position, and then were beaten, One doctor was set upon by muzzled dogs, the report said.

 Israeli spokesmen said the IDF raided the hospital because they had evidence Hamas fighters were hiding there.

  Also in February, two little Palestinian girls, sisters, who were putting water into a bucket in the courtyard of their home, were shot dead by an IOF tank. When their father came out and lay down next to them, he was shot dead, too.

The atrocities, the indiscriminate killings, the vast numbers of people being killed and the apparent attempt to engineer a famine, all point towards one conclusion: Israel is conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians.

 The International Court of Justice reached a similar conclusion when it determined that there was a “plausible case” to be made that Israel was carrying out a "genocide" in Gaza.

 It's clear a great moral crime against humanity is taking place in Gaza.

What is happening in Palestine rivals the ethnic cleansing/genocidal campaigns that took place in the 1990s in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. 

The question is, what is the world going to do about this, if anything?

Certainly some in the UN are oriented to taking action. Fahkri and some of his other colleagues on March 5 called for an arms embargo against Israel until Israel ceases its military campaign.

 A majority of countries on the Security Council of the UN have also agreed to a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

                    

Backers of a ceasefire in Gaza lobby for support from the City Council in Bridgeport, CT  The council approved a ceasefire resolution. (Reginald Johnson photo)

 But every time a ceasefire resolution has been presented to the Security Council, the United States has used its veto to kill it, making clear that the United States is the major stumbling block for the world taking collective action against Israel to stop the genocide.

 President Biden has talked recently, as have other Democratic Party leaders about the need for Israel to control its military forces and avoid civilian casualties. However, talk is cheap. The fact is Biden has not gotten tough with Israel to really back up his words. He could threaten the cutoff of aid to Israel to force that nation to stop the carnage, but he hasn’t done that. He could also ask the US ambassador at the UN to vote with the other nations on the Security Council in passing a resolution ordering Israel to stop its military operations. But he hasn’t done that either.

So until the United States changes its position on what Israel is doing that nation is going to continue with its grossly immoral and totally illegal ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.

The United States is the key. The policy here must change. This is why it’s so important that people on the local level continue to speak out and press their members of Congress as well as the White House to get on board behind a cease-fire and insist that Israel stop its barbaric operations. It should be noted that Congress has been as bad as Biden has been on the issue of Israel --- most members in Congress still oppose a cease-fire in Gaza, and that includes both Republicans and Democrats.

 It is somewhat of an indictment of our democracy that while a strong majority of the American people want a cease-fire in Gaza a strong majority in Congress are against it. This is almost entirely because of the huge contributions that are given by pro- Israel lobbies to members of Congress in both parties. The members of our national legislature are in Israel’s pocket.

People and voters have to make it clear to these members of Congress that they need to change their positions and get behind a cease-fire and in turn put pressure on the Biden administration to insist that Israel also agree to a cease-fire, or they will be voted out.

 The genocide in Gaza must be stopped.