By Helena Cobban
Dear friends–
I hope this finds you well.
The news from Gaza continues to be heart-wrenching. Click on the images above or right to learn some aspects of the situation there, or download the whole of that latest UN-OCHA report here.
Let us recall that after Israel’s ghastly April 1 attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy, which killed seven logistics people including three “internationals”, Pres. Joe Biden said he had bluntly “told” Israel to allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. (And he spent > $230 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars to send the U.S. aid pier to Gaza, “JLOTS”… which then promptly broke apart in the often swirling East Mediterranean waters.)
So in March, the Israeli military had been allowing an average of 139 trucks/day into Gaza. In April, the average went up a tad, to 169. In May, as Israel majorly assaulted Rafah, the daily average plummeted to 97 trucks/day. And in the first half of June it was 89 trucks/day.
As summer heat starts to scorch the remnants of Palestinian families sweltering/sheltering wherever they can within the Strip, starvation and disease haunt their lives in ever more dire ways.
But the fact remains that even with– or more likely, precisely because of– Israel’s use of such broad and cruel measures against Gaza’s people, the evidence is ever more clearly telling us that Israel is losing this war.
I’ve become increasingly convinced of this fact over recent weeks, and the evidence has continued to accrue. Yesterday, I wrote my first essay for a while on my Globalities platform. I took the opportunity to look at some of the key evidence both for Israel’s increasingly clear descent into defeat in Gaza– and for the strategic defeat that looms over it at the broader regional level… and I started to limn out some of the future implications of this defeat, at both the regional and global levels.
If you read the essay, do post your comments into the box at the end!
Some of the key evidence I adduced there came from the latest release by the Ramallah-based PCPSR polling outfit in the series of quarterly surveys that they’ve been running for many years, of opinions on various political matters expressed by Palestinians throughout the OPTs (but notably NOT also in the much more populous Palestinian diaspora.)
I’ve been following PCPSR’s polls for a while. The latest one, conducted in late May, showed a continuation since October 7 of strong support for Hamas in Gaza despite the Israeli military’s brutal attempts to turn the population against Hamas– and a notable increase in that period, in the support expressed for Hamas by the Palestinians of the West Bank:
As I noted in my essay, the University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has also used the PCPSR findings to reach similar conclusions, as he wrote in an intriguing piece that the very influential journal Foreign Affairs published yesterday.
Indeed, indications that some of the more intelligent portions of the U.S. political elite are starting to realize that Israel cannot win in Gaza are starting to pop up in many places. Among them, the piece that Tom Friedman published June 18 in which he called for Israel and the United States to, in effect, simply hand the whole of Gaza over to Yahya Sinwar and his colleagues in the Hamas politbureau a.s.a.p. And also (possibly) yesterday’s resignation of the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, Andrew Miller. I say “possibly” there because Miller, a very decent, clear-thinking person, gave as the reason for his resignation only “the need to pay more attention to my family.” But let us see what else he might have to say over the days and weeks ahead…
On a more personal note of my own here, I’ll report to you that it felt really good yesterday, to get back to doing some analytical writing on the “Globalities” writing platform that I launched back in January 2023 and that my board colleagues at Just World Ed then adopted as a JWE project.
Looking back at everything I published on Globalities last year, I feel that what I wrote there before October 7 gave me a strong basis for understanding the shifts in the global balance of power that our era is witnessing… and in what I wrote October-December I started to develop and explore some good suggestions for what supporters of human equality at the global level might most usefully do to help bring the Gaza crisis to a stable and rights-based conclusion.
(Anyway, you be the judge of the body of work that I have there on Globalities!)
But then in December my time became captured by the urgent needs of my publishing company, Just World Books LLC, which between 2010 and 2018 had published a totally distinctive set of books on Gaza and on Palestine more broadly.
In early December, as you almost certainly know, the Israeli military assassinated our author and friend the distinguished IUG literature professor Dr. Refaat Alareer. Since then, we’ve sold rights to Refaat’s key book Gaza Writes Back to around a dozen different foreign-language publishers. Hurrah!
Our other key Gaza-Palestinian author, Laila El-Haddad, has meantime been super-busy as an emerging leader in many Palestinian-American community initiatives– including as a lead plaintiff in the effort to sue President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin in civil court for their complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (Read Laila’s recent reflections on that effort here, in The Nation.)
Now, JWB plans to provide more support going forward to the outreach efforts for Laila’s powerful books on Gaza. Stay tuned for news of those plans!
… And of course, running Just World Ed’s programs during this crucial era has also required a huge commitment of my time– especially the super-timely “Understanding Hamas” project, for which we completed a very successful first phase back in May. We’re going to have a JWE board meeting Monday, at which we’ll be reviewing several plans for the future of this project. It has already started to gain some great viewer numbers on the Just World Ed Youtube channel.
Talking of which, the latest video to be posted there is the one taken at the speaking gig I did ten days ago, on “Palestinian resistance from the PLO to Hamas” at the Rossmoor community in Walnut Creek, CA. The large room there was packed solid and nearly all the people seemed very supportive. The Q&A session there was great!
However, the camera work there was bit, um, quirky. So you may find it equally easy just to listen to the audio, which was of generally great quality. You can do that here. (We’ll soon be posting our transcript of that event, too.)
And here is a pretty cute photo taken in Berkeley earlier this month. It shows JWE board members Rick Sterling and Nora Barrows-Friedman and me, after a little lunch we had together there. Both these fine people– like all our board members at JWE– are amazing leaders in the global movements for Palestinian rights and human equality. None of us takes a penny for the work we do for JWE. It is all completely pro-bono. It is always a special pleasure to catch up with my fabulous board colleagues in person!
So, my bottom lines here are:
I do really love to get back to doing my own writing, as well as doing all the other work I do! … And–
If you want to support Just World Ed and our projects– which include the “Understanding Hamas” project, the fabulous continuing PalCast project, my writings at Globalities, and much more– then please consider making the biggest donation to us that you can!
You can, as usual, click on the button below to do so. (And our big thanks to all of you who have already made wonderful donations to JWE in recent weeks!)
Two great PalCast guests to tell you about: Jennifer Bing and Deanna Othman
I realize that I now have two great PalCast episodes to report on. So here goes:
On June 11, PalCast host Dr. Yousef Aljamal and his sidekicks Tony Groves and myself got to delve into the long and distinguished record of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. We did so with the help of guest Jennifer Bing, who directs the Palestine Activism Program run by the leading U.S. Quaker service organization, AFSC.
Jennifer, who’s a longtime friend and colleague of mine, discussed the AFSC’s work in Gaza, both now and before October 7. Back in 1948, AFSC and its UK-Quaker counterpart had been the only “international” orgs providing relief services in Gaza to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees expelled there by the infant Israeli state. They did that for many months, until the United Nations got its act together and established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) in 1950…
AFSC has maintained a strong presence in Gaza ever since. I got to visit Gaza, the rest of the Palestine, and Palestinian refugee concentrations in other nearby countries with a big AFSC delegation, back in 2002, that was co-led by Jennifer’s father, the late Tony Bing— after which we published a report on our mission that many Quakers still deeply value. And six weeks ago, AFSC hired our very own Yousef Aljamal to work with Jennifer as the Gaza Coordinator for Jennifer Bing’s program!
So it felt like a wonderful family reunion to be with Yousef and Jennifer in that recording session… But our (online) gathering was seriously saddened since it was the first since the tragic loss of Yousef’s sister, Fatima, in Gaza. Yousef shared some of his reflections about her at the beginning of the episode.
Please listen to the whole of this very rich conversation, which is available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts
…..
And in the latest episode of the PalCast, recorded on Tuesday, Yousef, Tony, and I had a super-poignant conversation with Palestinian-American teacher, writer, and mother Deanna Othman. You can find this episode, too, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your audio.
Deanna is a Chicago-based Palestinian American with close family members in Gaza. With a Master’s in Journalism from Northwestern U, she now bridges the worlds of journalism, education, activism, and parenting. She’s the assistant editor of Islamic Horizons magazine and has contributed many years of service on the boards of AMP-Chicago and CIOCG.
In our convo she talked powerfully about the effect that visiting family in Gaza just last summer had had on her and her four rapidly growing sons. We were also able to discuss some of the latest updates from Gaza.
Do be sure to follow the PalCast on the listening platform of your choice– and to post favorable reviews for the Palcast there and wherever else you can, and to share news of this powerful tool for both learning and connecting, as broadly as you can with your friends and networks!
Well, that’s it for now. Bill the Spouse and I had a wonderful time visiting with our family in California and briefly with some dear old friends in Colorado. And now we’re back in a Washington DC, where the baking heat should remind us that it is way past time to end the waging of planet- and life-destroying wars and the build-up of gas-guzzling weapons systems.
As I said in my talk in Rossmoor, Gaza is the crucible– not just for successive iterations of the Palestinian liberation movement throughout the decades past but also, I think, for the birthing today of the new, war-free, equality-based, and truly multipolar world order that all of humanity now so desperately needs.
Ceasefire Now! End the genocide! End this inhumane, 57-year Military Occupation. Peace and Equality within historic Palestine!
You stay well–
Helena
22 June 2024
Source: justworldeducational.org