Just noting Roland S. Martin tonight. I'm still recovering from the weekend and seeing Jessica Lange in Mother Play. If you can see her, make a point to. (Ava and C.I. treated us to the play and the trip.)
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Scott, I know you were in the U.S. Army. You served two tours in Afghanistan. From what you've seen in Gaza, how does it compare?
I'm sorry, I cannot hear Scott right now.
SCOTT ANDERSON (Director, UNRWA Affairs Gaza): Sorry.
MARGARET BRENNAN: There you go.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The USAID chief, Sam Power - Samantha Power, said, conditions are worse now in Gaza than ever before. She said that was due to the Israeli military operations and closed crossings.
What exactly is the humanitarian situation right now?
SCOTT ANDERSON: So, what you have is 2.2 million people that have all been displaced at least once. Most have been displaced multiple times. In Rafah, ahead of the operation, we had over a million people again displaced, Khan Yunis to Karabela (ph). And what they're lacking is really just the basic necessities that we all kind of expect. They need food. They need access to water. They need access to showers, access to toilets, access to medical care.
And, unfortunately, because of a variety of factors, we're unable to import everything that's needed and to make sure that everybody has the basic necessities that they need to get through every day.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Nineteen different aid organizations released a letter this week saying Palestinians are surviving on less than 3 percent of their daily water needs. Hepatitis is spreading. Medical evacuations have been halted. Virtually every hospital has been issued evacuation orders.
The Pentagon said it has suspended air drops of food because of the Israeli military action. And, as we know, the pier is not really operating.
Who exactly is impeding the delivery?
SCOTT ANDERSON: I think it's a variety of things, not just one person you can point to. All of the - the bulk of our aid comes in through Karam Shalam (ph). It all comes through Egypt. Starts at Port Saeed (ph), goes through the Siani Calarish (ph) and eventually makes its way to Karam Shalam, where it's brought in by us to the Palestinian side and then onward for the last mile distribution within Gaza.
There's a lot of steps that have to go perfectly right for all that to work. And, unfortunately, not everything has gone right. For a time Egypt was not sending trucks where we had 80,000 metric tons of aid in a country we couldn't access. And - and we're - we've been perpetually playing catch- up on the aid situation since October. Not everybody has a tent that needs one. So you have people sleeping outside still as we're eight months after the start of the conflict.
And you - you highlighted correctly our number one concern at this point, which is access to clean drinking water. You know, without that, in addition to hepatitis, you have things like cholera and other diseases that can become very prevalent and we could see an outbreak happen very soon. And it's something that concerns us. And, additionally, it's getting hot. You know, it's summer. It's essentially you're in the desert. And if people don't have access to clean drinking water, that's a problem for dehydration, as well as for disease.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I know you are with the U.N. so you can't talk about politics and policy, but President Biden did make this address Friday talking about a proposal for a cease-fire and hostage deal. He said it would come with 600 aid trucks per day to enter Gaza with supplies, with shelter, and the like. Who's going to be doing all of that distribution?
SCOTT ANDERSON: I mean that would be the entire international humanitarian community because of the scale. I mean currently, UNRWA feeds a little over half the population. We're feeding about 1.3 or 1.4 million people every day. But it would be us, along with the rest of the U.N. and all our partners.
And I would say, we very much welcome a cease-fire. It's time for the hostages to go home to their families. Time for more aid to start coming in and then hopefully we can start rebuilding Gaza.
Israel has accepted US President Joe Biden's Gaza ceasefire proposal but believes the framework deal is "in need of much more work", an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says.
In an interview with Britain's Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Mr Netanyahu, said the framework deal presented by Mr Biden was "a deal we agreed to — it's not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them".
"There are a lot of details to be worked out," said Mr Falk, adding that Israeli conditions, including "the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organisation" had not changed.
It hasn't been accepted. Netanyahu is insisting he has to speak to Israel's National Security Minister -- the far-right wing Itamar Ben-Gvir who is not expected to support the proposal. THE NATIONAL reported a half hour ago, "Israeli cabinet minister Benny Gantz has said the US must put pressure on negotiators to ensure the proposed ceasefire plan is accepted." The editorial board of THE NATIONAL points out:
The conditions for a sustained peace require there to be no room for Israel's vacillations and doublespeak. The proposal to end the conflict is being touted as an Israeli one, yet its government insists on sticking to its goal of destroying Hamas.
Ultimately, it requires the US, Israel's most important ally, to exert pressure it seldom uses on the Netanyahu government for the war to end. It is for this reason that Mr Biden's announcement – after appearing reticent for months – is promising, even if self-serving in the run up to the US presidential election.
Large sections of American voters, disenchanted by the prolonged war, could well respond to the President's persistent unwillingness to rein in Israel at the ballot. A peace deal that evolves into a permanent ceasefire, and eventually a two-state solution, is then in Mr Biden's political interests.
The proposal is popular in Israel. ALJAZEERA notes, "An opinion poll conducted by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation shows that 40 percent of Israelis support the proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza announced by the US president this week. Twenty-seven percent oppose the plan." But, as THE IRISH TIMES notes, "Mr Netanyahu, long plagued by corruption charges he denies, sees staying in office as his best chance of avoiding prosecution, as well as putting off investigations and hearings into the security failures that contributed to Hamas’s October 7th assault." The BBC insists, "The US has 'every expectation' Israel will accept a ceasefire proposal that would begin with a six-week cessation of hostilities in Gaza if Hamas takes the deal, a senior White House official has said." Those of us who grasp that an unnamed "senior White House official" is really the last person to believe on this topic. An hour ago, the Israeli newspaper HAARATZ reported, "Hamas says Biden's proposal for Gaza deal 'is positive,' waiting on Israeli response."
The confusion probably began with the lie the White House initially told. Nathan Morley (VATICAN NEWS) reported, "US President Joe Biden has announced Israel had proposed a three-stage plan to Hamas aimed at reaching a permanent ceasefire. Amid a mounting death toll in Gaza, the United States is under huge pressure to end the conflict. Mr. Biden defined the plan as a thorough Israeli proposal that paved the way for a permanent ceasefire." But it was not the Israeli plan and that's among the reasons that they initially rejected it. Since that initial lie, it has been one long series of humiliations. THE GUARDIAN's Julian Borger reviews just how humiliated Joe Biden has been:
The latest peace plan for Gaza was given a launch worthy of a historic turning point, with the US president delivering remarks directly to camera from the White House state dining room, declaring it finally “time for this war to end”.
Yet even as Joe Biden spelled out the proposal – leading in theory to a permanent end to hostilities, large-scale food deliveries and the start of reconstruction, there was clearly something awry.
If this plan was an Israeli proposal as Biden claimed, why was it being launched by Biden in Washington? There had been no word from Israel. By the time Biden began his remarks, it was already Friday night in the Middle East, the sabbath was under way and government offices closed.
When the prime minister’s office did produce a statement in response, it exuded all the reluctance and irritation of a politician roused from sleep. Yes, Benjamin Netanyahu had “authorised the negotiating team to present a proposal” but it was one that would “enable Israel to continue the war until all its objectives are achieved”.
A second statement issued after daybreak was even blunter. Any plan that did not achieve Israel’s war aims, including the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capacity, was a “non-starter”.
US officials argued the deal would fulfil Israel’s essential security requirements so there was ultimately no conflict, but there was no getting around Netanyahu’s choice of language, which made it clear he was not the author of the new plan, but a grudging participant. It also appeared designed to humiliate Biden. An experienced communicator like Netanyahu would know that the phrase “non-starter” would appear in the morning’s headlines alongside pictures of the president making his bid for peace.
By now, Biden is used to humiliation at Netanyahu’s hands. In early May, he warned that if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) went into Rafah: “I’m not supplying the weapons”. Three weeks on, Israeli tanks have rolled into central and western Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which has been a refuge for more than 1 million displaced Palestinians. Nearly a million have had to flee for their lives once more.
Biden has not delivered on his threat to curb arms deliveries, which would have triggered outrage from not just Republicans but pro-Israel Democrats. Administration officials have instead sought to parse what “going into Rafah” means. When he issued his ultimatum a month ago, Biden had suggested it meant the IDF advancing to the city’s “population centres”. That has clearly already happened, but US officials are now arguing the forays so far have not been “major operations”.
Over the weekend, protests continued. Sophie Lamotte of FRANCE 24 reported on the thousands calling for a cease-fire in Paris.
Roughly 100 Columbia University students and alumni launched a “Revolt for Rafah” encampment on Friday night. Student protesters say their protest is a direct response to the Rafah massacre and a recent Washington Post article exposing a group of wealthy elites who used their power to influence New York City Mayor Eric Adams into using the police to quash student protests at Columbia University in April.
Dubbed “Revolt for Rafah: Installation 1,” the encampment was launched on Alumni Reunion Weekend at Columbia University. To date, alumni have stated intent to withhold an estimated $67 million dollars in donations to the university unless they drop disciplinary charges against student activists. On Friday, The Intercept reported Columbia University had quietly changed its disciplinary rules as disciplinary hearings were set to begin.
In April, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of several pro-Palestine groups at Columbia University, launched the first Gaza Solidarity Encampment in the nation. After that encampment was swept by the NYPD and more than 100 students were arrested, students at Columbia University launched a second encampment. Students at more than 130 campuses across the U.S. followed suit, launching their own Gaza Solidarity Encampments, according to data compiled by Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium—with more globally.
A strike is underway within the University of California (UC) system — with UCLA, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz all now participating — as unionized graduate student workers take collective action to protest the brutalization and repression of fellow union members and Palestine solidarity protesters.
With academic employees unionized with the United Auto Workers (UAW) walking out at all three schools, the UC administration has found itself contending with the consequences of its decision to invite state aggression upon its own students as they protested the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Those consequences appear to be piling up, with additional union workforces at UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara set to join the strike on Monday, and UC Irvine workers walking off the job on Wednesday, according to UAW 4881.
The strike takes place in a national context in which administration crackdowns on Gaza solidarity encampments have encompassed everything from sanction, expulsion and eviction of students and firings of faculty (and even top administrators willing to parlay), all the way up to violent police action, as was on especially ugly display at UCLA. The striking UC workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811 (also called the Academic Student Employees Union), were provoked to strike after UC administrators decided to shut down UCLA’s Gaza solidarity encampment by calling in city police, who stood by while a pro-Israel mob attacked the camp and beat protesters. The police crackdown led to direct harm to UAW members, among others. A subsequent encampment at UCLA was similarly dismantled by riot police — and a similar response is presently underway at UC Santa Cruz, where on Friday, May 31, police surrounded and cleared protest barricades at the entrance to campus, detaining an unknown number of demonstrators.
In November 2023, I wrote a letter to the editor on the importance of remembering the radical side of Princeton’s activist history and the politics of how we remember campus activism. As I wrote that letter, I could never have imagined the incredible things that current Princeton student activists would achieve just six months later with the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment, also known as the Popular University for Gaza. If my previous letter lamented the lost radicalism of past campus activism we needed to recall, then recall it we have. On a supposedly apolitical, apathetic campus, students occupied space in solidarity with the Palestinian people for three weeks, organized a hunger strike that lasted over a week, held rallies of over 350 people, and, most importantly, put Palestinian liberation at the center of campus discourse in an unprecedented fashion. That is something worth remembering.
The vital question we must now ask ourselves as a campus community is how will we remember this moment? As the great Palestinian literary critic Edward Said ’57 pointed out, there is a vital politics to memory, because how we remember and define our traditions of activism define who we imagine ourselves and our political horizons to be. As Said put it, “the invention of tradition is a method for using collective memory … memory is not necessarily authentic, but rather useful.” One of our moral imperatives now is to make the memory of the encampment useful, to understand what it represented and will represent for future generations of student activists. We must define a tradition that captures the encampment as it really was: rooted in hopeful, expansive visions of liberation, convicted in its radical politics, and full of solidarity.
We have already seen University administrators try to employ the politics of memory for their own ends. They have attempted to present student protesters as unsafe or as disruptive to respectful dialogue on campus. But that isn’t the reality. Faculty — themselves long-time students of traditions of protest and radical change — have made clear that sit-ins and other acts of protest in service of the Palestinian liberation movement should be remembered as part of a long tradition of activism for justice, both on this campus and beyond. These two narratives are actively competing, right now, to be the story of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Memory matters. And the choice between these narratives is just one small example of how the meaning of this moment in Princeton’s history is currently being contested and needs to be defined through the active work of remembrance.
Let's note this from Friday's DEMOCRACY NOW!
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today with another Biden administration official who resigned over the administration’s support for the war on Gaza. Stacy Gilbert served as senior adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which is the State Department’s chief humanitarian office and features heavily in internal policy discussions over Gaza.
This week, she sent an email to staff explaining her disagreements with a recently published State Department report that she worked on, but which concluded that Israel was not obstructing U.S. humanitarian assistance to Gaza. That report was used by the Biden administration to justify continuing to send more than a billion dollars of weapons to Israel. Stacy Gilbert resigned after working at the State Department for over 20 years, joining us now from Baltimore, Maryland.
Stacy, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain your final decision to resign.
STACY GILBERT: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
I have — about myself, I’ve worked for the State Department for a while. And it’s not just working in the State Department. I’ve worked in humanitarian issues, refugee crises, basically most every refugee and humanitarian crisis involving conflict in that time, so Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. My role in all of this, specifically, was supporting our team that oversees assistance to Gaza and the Middle East.
But specifically, working on this report, it was — we were directed in early February by the White House to come up with a report that assesses different countries based on two things primarily. One is their adherence to, as Alex mentioned, international humanitarian law, which is the law that says there are wars, but there are rules in war. There’s rules about the kind of weapons you can use, about making the distinction between civilians and combatants. And basically, it’s a body of laws that says, even in war, there are ways that you have to mitigate the consequences for civilians and soldiers. And we adhere to that. Israel adheres to it. It is international law. So this report was looking at adherence to that body of law, as well as whether countries allow humanitarian assistance.
There were several countries we were assessing, but the one, unsurprisingly, that generated the most debate was Israel. I was working on this report with many others. There were a handful of us who were very, very engaged in every sentence of that. But at some point, we were removed from that report, and it was moved up to a higher level to be written and edited and cleared. So, even though I had worked on this pretty heavily since this directive from the White House came out in early February, I did not know what was in the report until it came out.
That said, I was actually hopeful that it would be an honest report, because earlier that week the White House had made an announcement that it was going to pause the 2,000-pound bombs that have really caused disproportionate destruction in Gaza. So, they had announced a pause on that. And I was actually pretty hopeful that maybe this report was going to be honest.
So, when the report came out on May 10th late in the day, I read it. And I had to reread it, because I couldn’t believe what it said. It said very clearly — it actually — so, on those two points, I was surprised on the point about Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law. For the first time I’m aware of, we admitted — in very, very weak terms, but we admitted — that Israel is likely using U.S. weapons in violation of international humanitarian law. I was surprised. That was a step forward in admitting that.
I was shocked, however, that it also went on to say that Israel — it is our assessment that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance. That is not — that is not the view of subject matter experts at the State Department, at USAID, nor among the humanitarian community. And that was known. That was absolutely known to the administration for a very long time, not just within the government, but having received reports and letters from organizations on the ground in Gaza, organizations the U.S. government funds, credible organizations, saying Israel is blocking humanitarian assistance.
And that’s not to say that Israel is the only problem in this. There are certainly — it’s a conflict. It’s difficult. But these are professional organizations with expertise, local knowledge. They know how to work in conflicts. They know how to get — to do the negotiations to get the assistance to where it needs to be. They know how to do it. The issue is, they are not being allowed to.
And it’s a range of issues. It’s not just blocking trucks from going in, because we see, over the course of this conflict, sometimes trucks go in, sometimes they’re delayed, sometimes assistance goes in, but then it’s ratcheted back. But we’re seeing, consistently through this, a pattern of obstruction that the aid — that prevents these organizations from doing their work and delivering this assistance to the people who need it. It’s a variety of things. It’s blocking — it’s delaying or blocking visas for aid workers. It’s causing trucks to be unloaded because there is a single item that Israel considers dual-use. And the things that are considered dual-use are incredible: tent poles, flashlights, surgical scissors. All of these things, if found to be in a load of assistance, will cause the whole thing to be offloaded, back everything up.
And it’s this pattern of arbitrarily limiting, restricting or just outright blocking assistance going in that has caused the very grave situation in Gaza that we’ve heard about: famine. This is not hunger. Famine. “Famine” is a word that we are very, very cautious about using in the humanitarian sector. Words like “famine” and “starvation” are only used when very specific indicators have been met. So, the fact that there is famine is extraordinary. That doesn’t have to happen in a conflict, but it has happened here.
And the remedy — when you’ve reach the stage of famine, the remedy is not more food. Absolutely, more food is needed. But for people who are experiencing that extreme stage of malnutrition, that requires an immediate, intensive medical intervention. And where are you going to find that in a country now where the hospitals have been destroyed? For the people who have reached that stage, it’s too late. And any effort to bring in more food is absolutely necessary, but anything that comes in now is — it’s too little, too late.
And the reason we’ve come to this point is because of Israel’s obstruction. And to see that written in a report, a joint report from the State Department and the Department of Defense, to Congress is ludicrous. And I was just —
AMY GOODMAN: Stacy, we just have 30 seconds.
STACY GILBERT: — I couldn’t, for my —
AMY GOODMAN: Your final message to President Biden?
STACY GILBERT: Do the right thing. Listen to your experts. Do the right thing. It is difficult, but it is necessary, because what we’ve done up to now has not worked for anyone. It doesn’t help Israel. It doesn’t help —
AMY GOODMAN: And what is the right thing, in this last 10 seconds?
STACY GILBERT: — the people of Gaza. It undermines our credibility. The right thing is to acknowledge Israel is blocking humanitarian assistance, and there are consequences of that. And the consequences affect our military sales.
AMY GOODMAN: Stacy Gilbert, we thank you so much, former senior civil military adviser in the State Department, has just resigned. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 239 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza death toll reaches 36,479, with 82,777 wounded." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
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