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Showing posts with label Stanley Cohen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley Cohen. Show all posts
Stanley Cohen ✊ Is it too much to ask to hear your grandchildren’s giggle as they chase butterflies in fields while your mind’s eye journeys back to olive groves seeded for time immemorial by winds of warmth?


Is it too much to ask to joyfully dance Al-Sha’rawiyya or Dabke niswaniyyah while flirting with Ai’sha or Mohamed as they peek away in blush?

Is it too much to ask for children to be left uncaring to chase waves in peace while the sun sets over the shore and mussakhan readies for them to adore in the tabun?

Photo by Cole Keister

This is Palestine … in all its shining beauty …. in all its history … in all its age-old smile and gift.

Today in Gaza:

With Israel having fired some 30,000 air-to-ground munitions, 50% unguided and some 15000 tank shells lobbed into its residences, hospitals, schools, Masjids, churches, shelters, and refugee camps:

25,000 civilians (or 1 out of every 100) slaughtered, including all members of over 600 families;

12,500 plus children slaughtered;

57,000 plus wounded;

10,000 missing;

250-plus attacks on healthcare workers, vehicles and facilities with 600 medical workers slaughtered;

more than 105 journalists slaughtered;

100-plus employees of UNRWA slaughtered;

1.9 million people displaced … 85 percent of the population;

100,000-plus buildings and residences damaged or completely destroyed;

50,000-plus housing units destroyed;

234,000 homes damaged;

28 of 35 hospitals damaged, destroyed or closed;

More than a thousand children given amputations without anesthesia;

70 percent of school buildings damaged or destroyed;

200-plus registered heritage or archeological sites damaged or destroyed;

200-places of worship, Masjids and Byzantine churches, damaged or destroyed;

Northern Gaza leveled, isolated from the rest of the territory;

unemployment of 85 percent;

50% experiencing severe hunger;

400,000 cases of infectious diseases; and

with destruction of health care and essential infrastructure systems, tens perhaps hundreds of thousands will grow seriously ill, possibly die of infectious diseases.

Described by experts in the field of urban warfare and damage as “among the most destructive in history” Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, have noted:

It’s just the sheer speed of the damage … All of these other conflicts that we’re talking about Ukraine, Syria, Yemen are years long. This is a little over two months. And the sheer tempo of the bombing — not just the scale of it but the sheer tempo — there’s nothing that tracks this in such a short timeframe.

They conclude by noting the bomb tonnage dropped by Israel on Gaza had surpassed that dropped on London during the Blitz, and the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima with the percentage of damaged and or destroyed buildings having already surpassed that of the German cities destroyed in World War II.

Rising from the remains of 38,000,000 civilians who lost their lives in WWII to little more than wrong place … wrong time … or wrong faith, color or culture, an international tribunal emerged to hold the primary political leaders of the Third Reich and Japan responsible for unspeakable war crimes. The Nuremberg Tribunal which went on to try and convict several dozen war criminals relied on the testimony of the accused and hundreds of their victims; hundreds of thousands of exhibits; forensic evidence; numerous public declarations; and documented records of the accused’ individual activity. Although there are many thousands of pages of judgments, judicial opinions and findings one paragraph stands out in summing up, at least as to Nazis, the horrors they unleashed and the harms they brought:

The evidence relating to war crimes has been overwhelming, in its volume and its detail. It is impossible for this Judgment adequately to review it, or to record the mass of documentary and oral evidence that has been presented. The truth remains that war crimes were committed on a vast scale, never before seen in the history of war. They were perpetrated in all the countries occupied by Germany, and on the High Seas, and were attended by every conceivable circumstance of cruelty and horror. There can be no doubt that the majority of them arose from the Nazi conception of ” total war “, with which the aggressive wars were waged. For in this conception of ” total war”, the moral ideas underlying the conventions which seek to make war more humane are no longer regarded as having force or validity. Everything is made subordinate to the overmastering dictates of war. Rules, regulations, assurances and treaties all alike are of no moment, and so, freed from the restraining influence of international law, the aggressive war is conducted by the Nazi leaders in the most barbaric way. Accordingly, war crimes were committed when and wherever the Fuehrer and his close associates thought them to be advantageous. They were for the most part the result of cold and criminal calculation.

With these words, the Nuremberg Tribunal offered the world a terrifying vision of what most had long known but refused to accept, let alone act upon until it was far too late. That falter left millions dead and as many wishing they were for little more than their faith, their culture, their presence. Then it was Jews, here and now … Palestinians.

What can the global village possibly say to those who feel abandoned to inspire hope?

What can the global village possibly say to those who bury their dead in mass unmarked graves wishing it was them instead?

What can the global village possibly say to children sobbing for their mothers and fathers; parents wailing for babies lost to indifference?

Nothing.

In a just world, we are born into a dream of a healthy, long and peaceful journey; one filled with aspiration, love and personal chase … an opportunity built of equality- with no one life or community more important than any other. A chant that defies oath, anthem and flag. An unspoken talisman that every parent holds near and dear and close to their heart while beaming at what they have brought into being.

Yet some children… some faiths … some communities… some tomorrows are from birth deemed less worthy than others. Seventy-five years ago, it was Jews. Here and now Palestinians.

War crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war, such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

With these words, academics, scholars and jurists alike have spent careers teaching, writing, and litigating across the globe in the hope of humanity and the pursuit of justice. With no shortage of Conventions, Treaties and potential sanctions, those of us who pursue justice would like to think that with each generation that travail grows less daunting … that it becomes more powerful and consistent. It is, after all, a terrible trek to chase what is always just beyond our reach unless the victim is of the right faith, skin tone or politics. Then it applies. Once again, in Palestine, supremacy and privilege have swallowed law and numbed justice.

Although politicians, journalists and wannabe pundits alike continue to ramble on describing with blurred defective shouts what happened on October 7th but several miles from the massive Gaza Gulag, I am not one. I was not there. Nor were they. What began with bogus allegations of mass execution and wholesale civilian rape, with incinerated babies and hundreds of vehicles, buildings and homes bombed by the Qassam Brigades, has with the passage of time surely begun to whittle away as largely convenient political chant and useful fuel for retaliatory genocide and Western applause.

With increasing evidence, it appears the majority of those killed were in fact active-duty or military reservists, armed settlers or security personnel and thus potential legitimate targets under international law. So, too, firsthand accounts from Israeli civilians, various military sources and uncovered forensic evidence further dispel the calculated rewrite of what in fact occurred on October 7th. To be sure, having survived Israeli censors, there are now numerous verified reports of multiple instances where civilians lost their lives not to Palestinian execution, but reckless Israeli gunfire including tank artillery, helicopter auto-cans and rockets. Photos of destroyed buildings serving as military and security outposts and hundreds of wrecked vehicles, including heavy-duty Israeli ground combat equipment, clearly establish carnage the result of Israeli shells not Palestinian rifle fire.

But let’s assume civilians were in fact killed or assaulted by members of the Qassam Brigades or by unaffiliated armed fighters who apparently broke through the barbed wire doors of Gaza as well. If established by direct proof, not political prance, at an independent trial these would be clear violations of the law of war and those responsible should be held accountable. On this point, it bears noting, that years ago the Palestinian State and its various resistance movements, including Hamas, agreed to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and to abide by any of its findings following a full and fair trial based upon evidence, not chant; facts … not made-to-order fiction. If possessed of direct evidence of Palestinian crimes on October 7th why does Israel flee, as it always does, an independent judicial process and investigation resting instead not on a reliable search for truth, but on bombs and bombast driven by a relentless flow of shrill detoured deception?

Fueled by public screams for revenge, Israel, now in its third month of an unrestrained raging assault upon all of Gaza and all its population, is no doubt in clear violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War 1949, under which no civilian may be punished for an offense they have not personally committed. More specifically, Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II criminalize any and all collective punishment imposed against civilians and or their property. Guilty as charged.

This unmistakable command, which is neither new nor ambiguous, is echoed throughout long-settled international law. In strict and powerful terms, total warfare is absolutely prohibited under international humanitarian law. As noted in Article 48 of Protocol Additional I of 1977 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions for the Protection of War Victims, entitled “Basic rule:” “the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” Guilty as charged.

This prohibition is not alone: Under Rule 129 (b) of the ICRC parties to a non-international armed conflict may not order the displacement of the civilian population, in whole or part, for reasons related to the conflict, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand. Guilty as charged;

Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, includes “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected” as war crimes. Guilty as charged;

Article 6(b) of the Constitution of the International Military Tribunal provides that “ill-treatment . . . of the civilian population of or in occupied territory . . . killing of hostages . . . wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages ” shall be a war crime. Guilty as charged;

Article 6 (c) “namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated” shall be a crime against humanity.” Guilty as charged.

There was nothing original about these Articles when incorporated into the body of controlling jurisprudence at the Nuremberg Tribunals. They were a restatement of existing laws of war as expressed by the Hague Convention, Article 46, which states “Family honor and rights, the lives of persons and private property, as well as religious convictions and practices must be respected.” Guilty as charged.

From the very day that the United Nations commandeered it from Palestine, it has been clear that Israel respects nothing of international law or human rights. It simply believes that any such legal standard or civil command is inapposite to its very public and privileged march. Once again, without ambiguity, and on full obscene display, over these past several months the international ban on total warfare and the requirement that a warring state must distinguish between a civilian population and objects and combatants and military objectives is a message without meaning to Israel. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said … Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”

On another occasion, Netanyahu preached: “We have unanimously approved the widening of the ground invasion … Our objective is singular: to defeat the murderous enemy. We declared ‘never again’, and we reiterate: ‘never again, now [this is] Israel’s ‘second war of independence.'”

Not at all solitary in his call for the complete eradication of Gaza and all its long-entombed civilian prisoners, Israeli security cabinet member Minister Avi Dichter said “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba … Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu who suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities,” added “there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza.” Moshe Feiglin, the leader of the Zehut party, says a true win must “involve ‘occupation, displacement, and settlement’.” In a call for massive “depopulation” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said Gaza can only have a population of “100-200,000, Not Two Million.” Metula Settlement Council head David Azoulai said “the entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum …So the whole world will learn what Israel can do.” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Minister of Defense announced “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed.”

With atrocities not at all limited to Gaza, in the occupied West Bank during 2023 at least 483 Palestinians have been killed and some 13,000 injured by Israeli military and settlers no doubt inspired by the words of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, which call for the creation of a West Bank “sterile” zone.

In the law, whether domestic or international, state of mind and specific intent are cornerstones of prosecutions and defense alike. These words alone, leave no doubt as to the knowing and willing resolve of Israeli leadership of all positions to ignore Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which, in the relevant part, reads:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Under Art. II, it is clear that violations of the genocide prohibition are ultimately based not on the number of lives stolen, but the intent of the thief. Guilty as charged.

Make no mistake about it, Netanyahu and his Brooklyn Kahanists have not undertaken their Gaza rampage on the spur of the moment or haphazardly. And while endless commentary has occupied much of the Western focus on the planning necessary for the resistance to further its legitimate armed struggle, the purported Israeli response to the events of October 7th shows a ticking time bomb long awaiting a trigger. Lest there be any debate, Israel not by words, but clear unapologetic horrific deeds, and with the support of most of its population, has unleashed a limitless carnage intended to inflict as much pain, suffering, death and destruction in Gaza as possible. It is this crime of ethnic cleansing, of total warfare and premeditated genocide, that shreds in full any and all international humanitarian law.

Elsewhere Israel’s hideous, chest-pounding violations of the Geneva Conventions, of international humanitarian law, of the law of war, and the Rome Statute posit veritable primers for prosecution of its political, military and settler leadership for irrefutable violations of international law:

Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions provides the absolute prohibition on starvation as a method of warfare, prohibiting combatants “to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs”. This comports with Rule 53 of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Law Database which also cites the prohibition of starvation as a customary rule of international law. The deprivation of basic supplies necessary for the survival of the population, including food and clean water also amounts to a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) and to a crime against humanity under Articles 7(1)(b), 7(2)(b), and 7(1)(k) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Elsewhere, in relevant part, Arts. 13, 32 mandate civilians are to be protected from murder, torture or brutality, and from discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, religion or political opinion. Under Art. 18 civilian hospitals and their staff are to be protected. Art. 27 calls for the safety, honor, family rights, religious practices, manners and customs of civilians. Arts. 33-34 prohibit pillage, reprisals, indiscriminate destruction of property and the taking of hostages. Arts. 33,49 criminalize collective punishment or deportation. Art. 55 requires occupying powers to provide food and medical supplies as necessary to the population and maintain medical and public health facilities. And Arts. 55, 58 mandate that medical supplies and objects used for religious worship are to be allowed passage. As to each Article … guilty as charged.

History can and has often been a rewritten testament to storytellers who have a vested interest in its narrative and a powerful pen in its record. Yet the deadly dynamics of Gaza here and now from sunrise to sunset and all hours in-between is not one open to partisan pander or convenient call. There are countless witnesses on the ground of Gaza… neither Palestinian nor Israeli … not Muslim nor Jew- these are spectators to a horrific unfolding chronicle with no vested interest in the facts of its reality. Objective but not indifferent, these voices speak with tears of outrage against a chorus of international state silence.

Tom Potokar, a chief surgeon with the International Committee of the Red Cross, working in Gaza … “For me, personally, this is without a doubt the worst I’ve seen.” Potokar has worked during conflicts in South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Ukraine.”

Zaher Sahloul, president of MedGlobal and a doctor who worked in Aleppo during the bloody battle for its control: “what’s happening right now in Gaza is beyond any disaster that I’ve witnessed at least in the last 15 years or so.”

Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict … “But what we are seeing in Gaza, the level of death and destruction in this relatively short period of time, is absolutely staggering in comparison. Nowhere is safe for civilians.”

“The stench of death is everywhere – in every neighborhood, every street and every house,” says respiratory physician Raed al-Astal, from Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

In 2023 there is no longer a need to chase time-tired parleys built of rumor, wish or political necessity to determine whether crimes against international law and humanity have been committed by those who fire guns or drop bombs; whether undertaken under the talismanic guise of self-defense, or the necessity of national liberation. More than 150 years ago the rules of war emerged from the mass graves of 600,000 Americans killed in its civil war. Over these many years, as conflicts have raged and civilian casualties mounted, there have been international efforts to set the standards for the “good” war from the “bad.” And while Conventions, Articles, Rules and Covenants of warfare have evolved in theory to protect civilians—in particular our young, elderly and infirm— from the military reach of despotic states such as Israel, or independent nihilist groups that seek not freedom but domination, they remain little more than a hopeful tease unless those who break these international norms are held accountable and unless, unlike here, there are international courts and states willing to hold war criminals such as Israel to task.

There are historical crossroads where the directions to be taken will surely lead to either momentous dishonor and shame, or to hope for a better tomorrow for all. These pathways of justice are neither difficult to see nor thorny to define. That intersection is upon us now where Israel commits unspeakable crimes daily against not only Palestinians but what tragically has proven to be an evasively quixotic notion of international law.

While history recalls, as it should, the legend of Nuremberg with echoes of great pride and decrees of justice, let us not forget that those who there penned with righteous fury Article 6 (b) of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal committed their own war crimes having dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities between 1943-1945 killing more than half a million Germans. Can it be that the UK politicians who today scream anti-Semite for those who challenge Israeli carpet bombing are actually descendent from those who cried for international justice while the indiscriminate German blitz of 1940-41 saw some 43,000 civilians killed with numerous landmarks bombed including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London and the Imperial War Museum. And what of France which itself lost 175,000 civilians killed or injured during WW II with well more than a million homes destroyed, now flipflopping from humanitarian concerns around Gaza to President Macron saying that “he does not and did not intend to accuse Israel of intentionally harming innocent civilians in the campaign against Hamas … and that he unequivocally supports Israel’s right and duty to self-defense.” But then again, was it not France that killed upwards of thirty percent of the entire Algerian population during its three decades of occupation.

Yes, this is a hallmark crossroad: a generational test of time and purpose and a profound challenge for all those yet to come. In the presence of indisputable overwhelming evidence of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, we are painfully, perhaps predictably, witness to collective inaction by the United Nations and other international bodies and tribunals that preach from on high while perched as little more than silent witness to unspeakable Israeli crimes. That the United States and other long-time Israeli interlocutors are providing cover for the slaughter of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza, is of no surprise. It’s but an extension of a long cheer for a ravenous European colonial project no matter how evil its aim and deadly its result. Yet, international law is itself also under siege. If it is to survive and to serve any meaningful purpose other than to inspire law students, while amusing global states, it must be emphatically and uniformly enforced against all culprits and now. Guilty as charged.

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.

Guilty As Charged

Stanley Cohen ✊ How long ago was it that Colin Powell sat before the United Nations Security Council with his twisted trove of compelling evidence that Iraq was host to a veritable mountain of weapons of mass destruction just awaiting the right moment to unleash its Shia ravage upon the stainless West?


Of course, it was a lie, a conscious pretext to justify what was to follow where tens of millions throughout the Middle East paid for this US “hard intelligence” with their liberty, their lives, and their yearning for little more than the universal right for them and their families to pursue the freedom of life. Some twenty years later the weapons of mass lie continue to propagate daily with an unbroken fabricated flood of deadly Western puffery about an innocent pastoral Israel under siege not at all by virtue of its own long and well-established regional hands of occupation filth, but of course by the voracious anti-Semitic appetite of Iran, Palestine, and Hamas. It’s a lie.

Gaza City under Israeli airstrikes, screengrab
from Al Jazeera’s live feed.

When expedient, for years we have been apprenticed by largely Western Christian and Jewish tutors along with purchased “Islamic scholars” about the branded unresolvable divide between Sunni and Shia denominations which, they preach, all but guarantees periodic eruptions within the Islamic world. After all, was it not this internecine scriptural split that explains away the horrors inflicted in Yemen upon the impoverished Iranian-supported Shias by the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia and UAE largely with weapons that were made in the USA?

Although the Saudi/UAE inflicted casualties continue, when the world last cared reliable sources report that over 150,000 people were killed in Yemen, as well as more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war.

Not packaged, let alone understood, for the internal civil war it was, how much easier and politically convenient to simply blame Iranian support and “control” over Houthi Shias against a Sunni government as the trigger for what was clearly an Indigenous political rebellion. How often were we told that Houthis were fighting as Iranian proxies rather than as combatants in a native uprising largely directed at the lingering legacy of European colonialism? Sound familiar?

So, tell me, if the marriage of an uprising in the Middle East is ultimately fueled not by aboriginal aspiration but strict theological obedience, how is it that the Shias of Iran are dictating to the Sunnis of Hamas what to do and when? They ain’t.

There is nothing I can say at this point in history that will move the lockstep sentiments of personally invested or reality-disconnected Israeli cheerleaders to understand, let alone accept, that Hamas is an Indigenous national liberation movement, born not from abstract thought, religious fueled hate or the chase of personal fortune, but rather from the hardscrabble roads of Gaza itself. So, I will not try.

Are there Palestinians who disagree, even at times despair, of Hamas… of course. But after 75 plus years of ethnic cleansing, you will not find any wanting for wholehearted support for the resistance–be it from millions still occupied by a deadly colonial project, or those long ago exiled at gun-point from their age-old homeland by Europeans who tore across it with unrestrained bombast and endless thirst for blood. For without defiance, whether from movements or “lone wolf” … be it by armed struggle or passive resistance … one comprised of Muslims, Christians and non-believers alike–of women and men, students and scholars, only fools or desperate wizards believe that if left to its own unchecked device, a kinder gentler Israel would emerge to ensure justice and human rights for those whose dwindling land they thirst and liberty they detest.

Has Iran provided financial aid to Hamas, some of which was used for the purchase or production of weapons? Of course. Why not. It is not the only country that has chosen sides in this struggle against ethnic cleansing and for righteous justice. After all, the United States has funded Israel to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars these many years which has financed the use of phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilians in Gaza in violation of Protocol III to The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1983 and The Convention on Cluster Munitions of 2008. It has also armed snipers who have shot tens of thousands of peaceful protestors on the Gaza border in violation of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Not one to limit its backing of Israeli butchery to but the air and land of Palestine, the US has long subsidized an Israeli navy whose prime function is to attack and destroy Palestinian fishing and humanitarian aid vessels be they in the Port of Gaza or afloat in the Mediterranean Sea.

Never one to suppress its own geo-political thirst or economic appetite, The Convention on Cluster Munitions was ignored earlier this year when the US elected to arm Ukraine with thousands of cluster bombs. So too, it disregarded the transfer of American-made weapons it provided to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners in Yemen later transferred to al Qaeda-linked fighters, and other so-called radical Salafi militias. Nothing new about this. Independent of its invasions and occupations of Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, in the last thirty-five years alone the United States has intervened or proxied up in numerous international hot spots through money or weapons including Syria, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. With an unbroken sordid record of meddling, there is abundant evidence that the US has engaged in nearly 400 military interventions of one sort or another between 1776 and 2023. But Iran is the problem.

Over the years, billions in humanitarian aid have come to Gaza from Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey and Algeria to name but a few of the supportive sister states. Donated largely for reconstruction of essential infrastructure, schools and hospitals targeted and laid to waste by Israeli bombs, ribbon cutting in Gaza one of the world’s most densely populated and impoverished territories has proven time and time again to be but a momentary tease–with each restoration quickly lost to the next Israeli onslaught and the next and the next.

Once upon a time, before the lure of US dollars and Israeli shekels purchased a new generation in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia armed Hamas with rockets and other weapons for the defense of Gaza. However, that solidarity was to change with the arrival of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman who the very year he had Jamal Khashoggi murdered, told Jewish leaders in New York City that Palestinians should “start accepting peace proposals or shut up.” Five years later at the urging of Biden and with the blessing of his personal hedge fund banker, Jared Kushner, in the run-up to the Hamas strike, bin Salman was expected to sign the Abraham Accords. With that signature, he would have joined UAE, Bahrain and Morocco in a treacherous pact with Israel which places their own economic and geo-political interests ahead of not just palpable Israeli violations of international law, but all standards of decency and humanity. Trading in his bisht and red & white keffiyeh for Armani pinstripes, how can anyone avoid the overpowering stench of a regional double standard?

And what of the “proof” that Iran provided the skill set and dictated the nature and timing of the most recent Hamas strikes against the occupation? Now streaming in from predictable Zionist echo chambers at AIPAC and ADL to the halls of a cheap ill-informed Congress to the amplified one-sided MSM breaking news cycle… there is none. To be sure, like it or not, as a seasoned national liberation movement with an armed wing that has successfully battled to a stand-still Israeli jets, tanks, and battleships for decades, Hamas needs not, nor does it accept direction from non-Palestinian actors on how or when to proceed in its struggle against the occupation. Any such claim oozes with pejorative ignorance and racist superiority. Bearing the reek of classic hasbara, these shouts are but another in a long line of played deceits that Israel is an enlightened democracy under perpetual siege in the midst of doctrinal fired anti-Semitism.

Of course, Israelis tutor the West that they and they alone love and care for their families and young while the dominant regional Arab and Palestinian populations are more than willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters to a nihilist agenda in the name of Islam. Very much a living lie, for decades this marketing lure has enticed the neo-colonial West to ignore Israel’s marriage of hate and violence providing the money, weapons and Security Council vetoes it needs to keep it just beyond the reach of universal law and international accountability. Zionists would have us believe that Palestinians, per capita among the most highly educated people and culture in the world, know not what they want and or how to get there, but rather are mere dutiful vassals of Iran as it seeks to impose its brand of Shia fundamentalism upon the rest of the region. Nonsense.

Hamas is a national liberation movement dating back some 40 years to a time and place where an earlier generation of explosive, deadly Kahanists sought to corrupt if not rid Palestine of any collective aspiration of self-determination, independence and justice. The notion that all these years later the movement, now among the most sophisticated and successful in the region, if not the world, needs guidance, training and edict from any other state or people to fight on is but seductive sophistry in search of a vulnerable and ill-informed audience to bite the poison political pill. At its core, the tired screed that the Islamic Resistance Movement’s self-determination is determined by others not born of Palestinian families and heritage is but a shoddy deflection from the horrors unleashed by Zionists these past 75 years upon an Indigenous community dating back not decades or centuries but millennium.

For days now deceitful politicians and traditional media across the globe have parroted the sculpted Zionist talisman that there is war between Hamas and Israel. Not true. It is a battle for survival between a “nation state” of occupiers and a people long beleaguered … but not defeated. To be sure, if Hamas were to disappear tomorrow, the global Palestinian struggle for self-determination, liberty and justice would and will continue till it be had. To hear the unbroken chant of “terrorists” by Israel and its funders beggars the undeniable history of nonstop Zionist terrorism beginning well before the Irgun, Haganah and Palmach hanged British soldiers, bombed the King David Hotel, sent mail bombs across Europe and assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine all in the name of a theft of a land they had not known, if at all, for thousands of years.

With its leadership prominently displayed and well deserved on “wanted” posters throughout Palestine and in Europe for heinous offenses against civilians and repeated violations of settled international law, these Europeans went on to inspire generations to come with a dark deadly vision of a homeland not theirs to reclaim or to reconstruct and where, to them, no crime was too disturbing … no rationale too obtuse.

No matter what the Zionists rewrite, Palestine is a land stolen from age-old Indigenous communities with hundreds of thousands driven at gunpoint from their homes, but not their history. For the fortunate, they were exiled to refugee camps in and out of their homeland; for the less so, mass assassination, rape and a final rest rotting in wells were left as a message for others across Palestine. In the years since, that nightmare has continued unabated with millions of Palestinians living under the often-deadly, always despotic yoke of Zionist expanse and excuse; with many more eking out existence as stateless refugees living long and far from their native land.

In the years since the onset of the unchanged Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians including children and the elderly have been shot, crippled and murdered always in the name of a perverse ideal built fundamentally upon the suffering of others. Even more have seen the damp dark cellblocks of political prisons, uncharged or tried, stripped of their families and lives for little more than a voice, a prayer, a hope. For years, Gaza has been the world’s largest open-air prison, one bounded on all sides by the hatred and terror of Israel and the complicity of its partner in cruelty–Egypt. But a short recast reminds us it is no stranger to Israeli war crimes.

With an opening salvo on December 27, 2008, Israel bombed the main police headquarters in Gaza City, killing 42 cadets standing in formation–none bearing weapons. Later it blew up 18 other police stations throughout the Gaza Strip. In total, 248 police officers were killed having not fired a single shot at Israeli forces. Over the twenty-one days that followed, Israel deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure and made widespread use of prohibited weapons, such as white phosphorous, in highly populated areas in clear violation of international law. During the onslaught, Israel targeted 23 U.N. buildings and/or compounds killing numerous civilians who had taken shelter there. In the deadliest case, 43 civilians were killed by an Israeli shelling of one such compound. Palestinian schools were also targeted. On January 5, an aerial strike killed three men who had sought shelter at the Asma Elementary Co-Ed A School. Twelve days later, a military ordinance struck the Beit Lahia Elementary School while it was being used as an emergency shelter… killing two young boys and injuring 13 others. Human Rights Watch documented at least seven instances where Israeli soldiers executed civilians… including five women and four children who were standing together waving white flags to convey they posed no threat. In another incident, Israeli soldiers shot and killed several members of the al-Najar family in Khuza’a village, east of Khan Yunis. Following orders from soldiers to leave their neighborhood, and while waving white flags, Rawiya al-Najjar and her family were gunned down. When the carnage ended, some 1440 Palestinians were killed and more than 5,000 injured… most of them civilians. According to the Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem, 252 minors under the age of 16 (boys and girls) who did not take part in any fighting were killed along with 111 women and girls over 16.

Five years later, in the summer of 2014, the world was reminded of what it is to be a Palestinian in the crosshairs of a colonial fiend hell-bent on relegating them en masse to the ranks of the disappeared. During Israel’s unhinged six-week rampage it dropped 40,000 tons of explosives on more than 5200 “targets” throughout Gaza. At its end, some 2200 Palestinians were slaughtered, including 550 children, with some 10,000 others injured. Almost all the victims were civilians. More than 1900 children were orphaned, and hundreds of thousands were internally displaced with 20,000 homes, 26 NGO service providers, a half-dozen UNRWA facilities, 23 hospitals and health-care facilities, 133 schools, 360 factories, and 50,000 acres of croplands destroyed or damaged by Israel. Half of Gaza’s poultry stock was slaughtered along with thousands of family pets.

These are but a few of the more glaring examples of the recent yet unbroken mayhem long unleashed by Israel against a Palestinian community that never left its roots or lost the call of its collective claim. To keep track of this havoc is to bear witness to unspeakable crimes typically against the frail, the young, the passive who carry hope and horror-not weapons. According to Save the Children in the run-up to the most recent explosion, 2023 had already proved to be the deadliest year for Palestinian children since records began with at least 38 of them killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. That number has increased exponentially over the last several days with, it has been reported, some 500 additional children killed in Gaza. The Defense for Children International, a Palestinian human rights organization focused on child rights, reports that since 2005 major Israeli military offensives have killed more than 1,000 children in the 140 square mile prison of Gaza.

Meanwhile, there are some 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons including 33 women and 170 children held largely on what are described as “security grounds.” Detained essentially indefinitely, they never see the inside of an Israeli civilian courtroom with the benefit of meaningful counsel, and the rights to due process and a trial. For them, it is very much a military star chamber–one overseen by a military judge and a military prosecutor with endless six-month detention extensions absent any cap, or established evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

In the most recent battle, the list of dead and injured civilians continues to grow on both sides and must stop. Yet the narrative of what has happened and why is no less destructive. No matter how many times politicians and theists of all callings seek to control and market the account by blaming Hamas and victimizing Israelis alone, even a cursory search establishes it is an obscene escape from reality. Long before Hamas arrived, Palestinians of all faiths, politics and aspirations fought against the expulsion, hatred and violence forced upon them by European terrorists in the name of a desperate historical rewrite. One which sought and continues to justify ongoing ethnic cleansing as so much an absolute historical rite of passage–a claim that defies the reality of time and long-settled decency and humanitarian law.

Tragically, after all the millennium we still live in times not unlike the dark march of history where struggles are judged not by the equal application of international law or the will and wail of justice but by the color of one’s skin, the echo of one’s words, the pose of one’s prayer. All too often, the scale of righteousness is weighted not by the credence of the cause but the partisan of one’s cheer. A double standard at best, it is a jury of institutional inequality–one that passes judgment not by the virtuous but the powerful; not by equal application of law but the coercive command of presence. It is specious posturing at its finest; an opportune script sculpted by occupiers across the globe, and not the occupied. It must stop.

Until the community of onlookers imposes the same standards upon colonizer as they do the colonized; upon Jews and Christians as they do Muslims; on skin tones of white as they do of color, the history of yesterday and that unfolding before us today remains locked in a dismissal falsified story-line. Ultimately, that description instills upon us all the bleak chronicle that the difference between “freedom fighter” and “terrorist” is not the justness of the cause … but who wins.

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.

Weapons of Mass Lies

Stanley Cohen ✏ Once again, the mindless Zionist cheer was in full-on truth pogrom this week over the purchased news that citizens of Israel, one of the most despotic repressive and hate-driven states in the world, would no longer be subject to a vetting process designed, in theory, to safeguard the United States and its residents from visitors from other lands who pose a threat not just to “national security” but the safety of those who call the US home.


Let me be clear, I have long opposed the United States visa program as an entirely ambiguous and discretionary process fueled by enormous bureaucratic abuse which uses security as but a palpable cheap talisman when in reality its unrestricted ambiguity is intended to minimize the domestic impact of the international diversity of thought, politics, race, faith and identity. All too often Black, brown, indigenous and Muslim passport holders have been denied admission to the US long before arriving at its shores when their applications for visas have been denied by US consulates and embassies in their native lands following interrogations by junior State Department staff. This is particularly true for the stateless and other refugees fleeing oppression at the hands of their own governments (often US proxies) or, in the case of Palestinians, by an occupier which seeks to eradicate them in their entirety and which, once again, has been amply rewarded for it.

Photograph Source: ctj71081 – CC BY 2.0

Zionists galore preached falsely yesterday there is little difference between a rote minute-long passport visa waiver admission onto an airplane or upon arrival at a US port of entry and a visa application process that for many can and does run into numerous visits and months of delay – and for most ultimate denial — at a local US government building … an abusive process often driven by sexual harassment and rude pejorative lecture.

In short, the beneficiary of a US visa waiver program is assumed to be of good stock, safe politics and proper faith. Of course, for almost all such political payees they pass the skin tone test with fleeting glance alone. How much easier and honest it would be for Homeland Security officers at checkpoints to simply say welcome to you white, Christian, and now Jew.

Yes, waiver benefactors must, along with dozens of others so privileged, spend a few minutes in a line being asked the standard questions by security before boarding a flight such as… are you carrying explosives, or kilos of cocaine, or severed body parts? To be repeated upon arrival at a US port of entry along with the additional query of why have you come here and where will you be staying? Yes… that’s it. You know . . . 


Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Against this tiresome time-consuming painful process (ha-ha), stands the visa chase typically built of multiple visits to a secure US military-like compound where applicants are not just finger-printed, but often subject to hours of highly intrusive personal interrogations which include targeted questions about associations and family, political beliefs and activities, gender identity, and “criminal” history. Interviews, often canceled at the last minute, and not to be rescheduled for weeks or longer, before a visa is, if at all, granted there are security checks drawn typically not just from unreliable databases filled with baseless innuendo, rumors and uncorroborated allegations, but compelling dispositive Google searches. And why not?

After all, unlike the waiver recipients who– absent an INTERPOL Red Notice popping up on a passport—are admitted with no additional screening or questioning of consequence, visa applicants must successfully navigate an entirely arbitrary intel/security system that can deny admission to one simply seeking to visit family or to go on holiday for literally of dozens of specious and irrelevant reasons.

Of course, unlike waver beneficiaries, visa admissions are routinely denied even for minor, decades-old criminal convictions that say absolutely nothing about any current threat level of the traveler. To be sure, it is not all that unusual for those visa holders who have spent thousands of dollars and weeks of travel to arrive at a US port of entry to be greeted by excited family members only to be turned back. They can be refused entry without any stated reason as, unlike a waiver recipient, a visa does not guarantee entry into the United States. It simply allows a foreign citizen to travel to a port-of-entry which upon arrival can be denied by the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection or a rookie immigration inspector, based on little more than a hunch … or is that a twitch.

Against that light, visas will not be issued by a US consulate or Embassy officer where any alien who, while serving as a foreign government official, was responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom or …. to violate any law of the United States relating to espionage or to violate or evade any law prohibiting the export from the United States of goods, technology, or sensitive information… or who stands in opposition to the policies of the United States Government.

And then there is the bar to admission for anyone who has engaged in or incited “terrorist” activity or has, under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily harm, incited terrorist activity or who belongs to a ‘terrorist’ organization or a political, social, or other group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity.” In addition, “an alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is inadmissible.”

So, too, those who have “ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in genocide … is inadmissible as are those who have committed, ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the commission of any act of torture … or under color of law of any foreign nation, any extrajudicial killing. Likewise, any immigrant who is or has been a member of … any other totalitarian party (or subdivision or affiliate thereof), domestic or foreign, is inadmissible.”

Can anyone say Zionist “settler?”

How about Israeli soldier?

How about Shin Bet?

How about Mossad?

How about the Knesset?

Kahanist?

Welcome home to Brooklyn …Don’t forget to collect your El Al frequent flyer miles.

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.
You can no longer follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw

Welcome To The US, Land of Unvetted Occupiers

Stanley Cohen ✊ “As long as Germany declares the Jews to be an inferior race, poisoning and persecuting them, decent, self-respecting Jews cannot deal with Germany in any way, buy or sell or maintain any manner of commerce with Germany or travel on German Boats.”

30-December-2022
With this clarion call born of principle and necessity, a respected Rabbi and leader of the American Jewish community of the early 1930’s called for an absolute boycott of German goods as the “duty of all self-respecting Jews.”

Photograph Source: Takver – CC BY-SA 2.0
He urged the boycott not because German’s were white, or Christian, or blonde haired and blue eyed. And few if any in the United States accused him of any such mindless targeted hate. The boycott, which was fundamentally rooted in human rights, was necessary in an effort to try to stem the growing odium and bloodletting sure and soon to follow.

Today, a similar call to boycott a later day hate also built of religious and cultural supremacy and persecution in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, is reduced by Zionists to the all too expedient talisman of anti-Semitism, no matter what’s its words, its speaker, or its purpose.

“Antizionism is antisemitism. Zionism is an integral component of the Jewish identity.”

Armed by these glaring self-serving words of ignorance and duplicity, a Tel Aviv based law firm announced with perverse pride and desperate Constitutional rewrite a complaint it filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act with the Department of Education against the University of California, Berkeley Law School over its “failure” to punish several student organizations for the temerity of adopting a pledge to engage in a non-violent boycott of Zionist or pro-Israel speakers.

It is not by accident that the plea of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise framed almost a century ago in response to the palpable taste of national socialist hate and the looming clouds of genocide, have long been seen as heroic, yet today there are many who applaud a nation state built of the same vile ambition; those who seek to silence principled voices unwilling to accept the deadly acridity of unchanged flavor.

On so many levels, this civil action against a famed law school like the hollow show-tune words that proclaimed its filing, speaks to a double standard of life and law that serves as the very foundation of a racist colonial project that all at once has kidnapped the millennium of Judaism and, with routine ease, once again seeks to strip the U.S. Constitution of the very vitality, the very mainstay of its historical speech paradigm.

Which is more glaring, is hard to say.

Is it the deadly whoopla of contemporary Zionists who, like their predator geo-political ancestors of but a 150 years ago, seek to reduce the Judaism of thousands of years, to mere flock of aimless geese awaiting salvation through the arrival of European tour guides to escort it across the sea en masse to steal Palestinian lands, Palestinian liberties, Palestinian lives?

Or it can it be that the long-settled unanimous law of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. announced by the Supreme Court with grand daring and constitutional pride, not popularity, more than 40 years ago that boycotts undertaken through the exercise of speech, assembly and petition are essentil to First Amendment rights protects all but those who dare to challenge Israel and the dutiful political theocracy of its Zombie-like Zionists?

Or is it the self-evident double standard of an Israeli law firm which deigns to walk through the constitutional doorways of another place and history to dictate the parameters and importance of its speech and assembly rights, while applauding with absolute obedient silence the lack of any such consequential freedom in the heartbeat of his own?

Let us begin with NAACP v. Claiborne. Though time and time again Zionists have tried to restitch a simple but broad and compelling narrative into a narrow as applied test of limited constitutional consequence, that handy partisan invention has been rejected repeatedly by courts throughout the United States.

Claiborne finds its genesis in a 1966, on-again-off-again boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Miss., initiated by the NAACP to secure compliance by both civic and business leaders with a lengthy list of demands for equality and racial justice. Although there were some periodic acts of violence the boycott was known largely for picketing, distributing leaflets, giving speeches and holding rallies. Causing serious economic hardship to many of the local merchants, years after the boycott began the Mississippi Supreme Court found all of the boycott as illegal holding the NAACP and 129 codefendants jointly and severally liable for $1,250,699 in damages and attorneys’ fees. On appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States the verdict was vacated, with the court holding that “boycotts and related activities to bring about political, social and economic change are political speech, occupying the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.”

Well before NAACP v. Claiborne, boycotts have bequeathed an essential and lasting international footprint in the chase of justice and equality, a battle that knows not the limitation of any given time, place or party. As noted by T’ruah, in its amicus (friend of the court) brief on behalf of more than 2,000 Jewish clergy in opposition to the anti-BDS effort framed in Arkansas Times v. Waldrip, as long ago as 1770 a colonial boycott was called for by a legislative resolution of Virginia against British and European goods. Two years earlier Boston merchants had voted to block English trade, a boycott later joined by various businesses in New York and Philadelphia and by every-day colonists who undertook a protest against imported British products. Framers, Alexander Hamilton who was one of the signatories of the United States Constitution and John Jay who was president of the Continental Congress, the first Chief Justice to the Supreme Court and later the Governor of New York both boycotted merchants who engaged in slave labor.

In 1791, English merchant James Wright stopped his sale of sugar from the West Indies because it was produced by three-quarters of a million slaves who had been kidnapped to Barbados and Jamaica to be used as the cornerstone of the sugar-exporting industry. Less than a century later the formal “boycott” was born when Irish workers used, essentially, as slave laborer’s, grooms, coachmen, and house-servants organized a protest against Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott who, after retiring from the army to become a land agent, sought to raise their rents; evicting those who could not afford to pay. Faced with a growing protest driven by tenants who refused to work, local businesses that would not accept his money and with his mail delivery stopped, Boycott was forced to leave Ireland.

Fast forward to Germany 1933 where “In the wake of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power,” T’ruah, in its amicus, cites the effort by Rabbi Wise who played a prime role in organizing the boycott against German goods in an effort to expose and isolate the country for its attacks on Jews and others for nothing more than their faith, culture and history. Though a failed effort, it is beyond challenge that this plea for a non-violent boycott against regimes built of racial or religious supremacy and tyranny was later echoed by most of the world, excluding Israel, against South Africa-an earlier but less deadly iteration of its own Zionist apartheid today. And in Martin Luther King’s Constitution: A Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott famed law professor and author Randall Kennedy notes that the Montgomery Bus Boycott gave rise to Gayle v. Browder which “effectively overruled” the separate but equal racial poison of Jim Crow, approved of in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Elsewhere non-violent boycotts, large and small, be they by movements or people have proven to be the launch paradigm upon which the drive for liberty and justice was ultimately built and obtained. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi led a 240-mile march in India to the Arabian Sea as part of a boycott against Britain’s colonial salt laws. It proved to be not just essential to the end of the salt tax and the release of political prisoners, but was a prime stoke of the fires of independence which ultimately drove Britain from India.

International boycotts against predator corporate or state policies are not at all an anomaly. To be sure, there have been numerous successful boycotts against multi-national corporations involved in the manufacture of dangerous products or permitted the use of child workers, or provided inadequate safety and industrial hygiene measures, or had a lack of drinking water, or no minimum wage or caps on work weeks, or were in bed with support for military regimes or which exploited migrant workers or placed their corporate coffers ahead of blatant human rights abuses. For example, among such boycotts which ultimately proved successful were those begun against Nestle in 1977, Nike in 1990, Pepsi in 1997 and Gap and Taco Bell in the early 2000’s, with resulting changes in product and work safety and conditions and the end of relationships with totalitarian regimes. In 2003, Liberian women went on a sex strike to end the country’s civil war; it worked with its primary organizer and leader Leymah Gbowee awarded a Nobel Peace Price for her efforts. In PereiraColumbia female partners of gang members also went on a sex strike demanding the end of gang violence and fewer guns. Within a few years the murder rate in Pereira had dropped by some 26%.

Domestically, in the United States boycotts have a storied and successful history as well. For example, in 1965 on Mexican Independence Day, Cesar Chavez and other Latino farm workers launched the “Delano Grape Strike” in support of Filipino-American grape workers for better wages and working conditions. Ultimately prompting an international boycott, it proved successful and led to the nation’s first farm workers union: the United Farm Workers of America. In 1984, when Food Lion refused to sign a “fair share” agreement to improve employment and economic opportunities for black workers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized a three-day protest and boycott of dozens of stores it operated in various Southern cities. The boycott ended after Food Lion signed an agreement which required increased minority opportunities including more management positions and signing on with more minority-owned vendors.

Boycotts come in many shades of challenge. Following an unsuccessful international boycott of J.P. Stevens products of some four years, along with traditional strikes and mass picketing, the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union moved on to apply tertiary pressure upon the banks and corporate lenders, insurance companies and Wall Street investors which JP Stevens relied upon. Other strategies included hundreds of individuals and organizations such as unions, religious and political organizations purchasing a single share of its stock in order to crash the company’s annual meeting to directly confront management. Meanwhile, thousands of protestors marched around Stevens Tower. Described at the time as the “biggest labor-management war of the last two decades” the battle– which was very much the real-life manuscript for famed movie Norm Rae– ultimately prevailed with the union’s multi-faceted tactics leading to the first collective bargaining agreements between J.P. Stevens and more than 3000 of its workers at its ten plants in the Carolinas and Alabama. Today the AFL-CIO maintains boycotts against 22 hotels in 5 states and the District of Columbia, 2 food and beverage businesses including products made in Mexico, an e- cigarette manufacturer and two law firms.

It is fitting indeed that the transcendent message of NAACP v. Claiborne was recently parroted by a district court in Washington, D.C. albeit in a context other than a boycott. In rejecting the application by the former president in Thompson v. Trump to dismiss a lawsuit, the court reminded those who seek to tamp down on non-violent dissent that “Expression on public issues has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values … [that] speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government [and] embodies our profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

Not long thereafter in United States v. Hilliard a decision from the Eastern District of New York the court affirmed the constitutionality of boycotts chiding a party to the litigation for their failure to recognize that “Claiborne involved an economic boycott over racial discrimination by white merchants, which is the type of peaceful political expression on public issues that has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.”

While these cases do not specifically implicate efforts to silence BDS, nevertheless in their striking dispositive language and sweeping constitutional application they serve as an ever-present reminder that non-violent speech is not a verbal beauty contest but a guarantee of freedom from state efforts to silence unpopular words or assembly. Nowhere is that cue more telling or lasting than it was in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, where the Supreme Court agreed that a statute which provided: “”[w]hoever places on public or private property a symbol . . . but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor ” violated the First Amendment.

There is nothing sui generis about these cases which echo numerous decisions that have come before and will follow to be sure including many that have rejected legislative assaults on the non-violent BDS movement. And while the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals– which speaks directly to the diversity and speech concerns of the body politic of Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas (don’t venture out alone at night venues)–recently upheld anti-BDS legislation on the grounds of the so-called commercial speech exception, its twisted dishonest mental gymnastics is directly at odds with Claiborne and all other decisions that have faithfully held that the First Amendment is not one to be decided based upon the faith, politics or pockets of its proponent.

Given the Eighth Circuit’s reversal rate of almost 80% these last 15 years, were todays Supreme Court a bench driven not by personal political posture but constitutional precedent, it might well look to the keen journey of various lower courts which have previously struck down legislative attempts to ignore Claiborne and to silence BDS in clear violation of the First Amendment.

For example, in Jordahl v. Brnovich, the court sided with those challenging an anti-BDS statute in Arizona noting “The Act’s history instead suggests that [its] goal is to penalize the efforts of those engaged in political boycotts of Israel and those doing business in Israeli-occupied territories because such boycotts are not aligned with the State’s values.” Koontz v. Watson drew a similar conclusion finding that the “goal of the Kansas law requiring that persons contracting with the state certify that they are not engaged in a boycott of Israel was either viewpoint discrimination against the opinion that Israel mistreats Palestinians or subject matter discrimination on the topic of Israel and that both are impermissible goals under the First Amendment.” In Amawi v. Pflugerville Indep. Sch. Dist. the court rejected a Texas anti-BDS statute which prohibited boycotting of Israel as boycotts against Israel were inherently expressive conduct and thus protected speech. And in Martin v. Wrigley the District Court rejected a Georgia statute that for employment purposes required parties to certify they are not engaged “in a boycott of Israel is no different that requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs or to engage in certain political associations. The Supreme Court has found similar requirements to be unconstitutional on their face.”

And what of the attack on Berkley Law school? Title VI of the Civil Rights Act decrees that: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”

Assume for the sake of argument student groups at Berkley Law School which seek to participate in constitutionally protected BDS activity by boycotting Zionist or pro-Israeli speakers are recipients of “Federal financial assistance.” Nevertheless, while Jews have, by Israeli law, been awarded a supremacist seat in the hallways of Israeli government, politics and life, Zionism (with its Jews of Europe and North America, its Christians of the US South and its Muslims of the Gulf states) is not a race, a color, or unique national origin under the guideposts of settled US law.

To be sure, while other international states and entities lacking any constitutional foundation let alone protection for individual speech and association have, by wave of magic wand alone, conflated and converted a political movement born of a political purpose and agenda to that of a faith, no such paranormal conversion has found de jure acceptance in United States courts. Cast from a less nuanced speech portal, be it a megaphone handled by a student, a professor, an activist, a writer or a parent at home, they are fully protected in pronouncing Israel as little more than a racist settler colonial project.

Moreover, The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) which enforces Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not a grand state censor empowered to dangle US dollars over the market-place of ideas in an effort to control its parameters or to force open its private doors to welcome the boycotted speech of others. Markedly absent here, over the years OCR has moved to intervene when US dollars have been used directly or incidentally to deny access to equal education opportunity, limited equal rights to public education based upon immigration or citizenship status, funded discriminatory-based discipline, denied equal opportunities for English learners, furthered discriminatory assignments to education services, assisted bullying, harassment and retaliation based upon race or undercut racial diversity. None of these considerations is implicated, let alone threatened, by the free-speech choices of Berkley law students who say no to the imposed sale of a theocracy that engages in mass violations of human rights.

Title VI claims are not new. And while the Israeli firm seeks to rewrite their reach and burden, unlike much of Israeli law driven by chest pounds, and little else, here faith hurled screams of “we are chosen” will do little more than draw a yawn. Putting aside the failed threshold requirements of sufficient state funding and a specific breach of legislated law, this matter is what is known in the law as an action seeking third-party relief; that is to say it seeks to hold Berkley responsible, as a whole, not for its own policies or practices but those of another … here several student groups that in the exercise of their private First Amendment rights did nothing more than to refuse a speaker’s podium to outside Israeli cheerleaders.

Long ago the highly respected Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in Zeno v. Pine Plains Cent. Sch. Dist. that under Supreme Court precedent to survive summary judgement in a claim of intentional discrimination it must be established that Berkley had (1) actual knowledge of the alleged violation; 2) that the conduct amounted to was severe and with a discriminatory purpose; and 3) that Berkley exercised “substantial control over both the harasser and the context in which the known harassment occurs.” That is to say the “school must have “control over the alleged harassment” and “authority to take remedial action.” Moreover, a Title VI claim is not an ambulance chase. As noted by the Third Circuit in Whitfield v. Notre Dame Middle School the challenged conduct must not only be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” but generally speaking deprive “the victim of equal access to the school’s educational opportunities and has a “systemic effect on educational programs or activities.”

Under these attendant circumstances, the attempt to sting the United States Department of Education or to bully a university legendary for an activist student body empowered by speech and protests into recognizing or redefining Zionism as an identified race, color, faith or identity of unique national origin will fail. A plain read of the Tel Aviv based Title VI challenge against Berkley says … dismissed.

On the other hand, let’s assume the Berkley claim has legs and in fact survives a motion to dismiss as unfounded. Will its Zionist handlers impose the same claim and screed against hundreds of U.S. rabbis for being anti-Semitic? Indeed, recently some three hundred U.S. rabbis and organizations and at least one university, the Los Angeles based American Jewish University, announced a boycott which will ban “far right” Israeli lawmakers affiliated with the Religious Zionist bloc in the Netanyahu government from speaking before their communities.

That this boycott includes community groups and a university which receives federal money for its various programs would seem to render it no less within the reach of Title VI than the action filed against Berkley Law School. Although the stated purpose of the rabbinical boycott is to take a political stand against Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews who seek to change the Israeli “Law of Return”; who wish to undercut LGBTQ rights; to permit the Knesset to veto rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court; to annex the West bank; and to expel “Arab” citizens who oppose Israel’s government, are these rabbis who dare to challenge not the faith but the politics of Israel any less anti-Semitic for the flavor of their boycott?

So, Tel Aviv counsel spare us your righteous indignation. Yours is a Bar built not of the pursuit and protection of equality and justice, but by an oath of institutional surrender which willingly accepts judicial cellblocks against equality, assembly and speech. Indeed, the paradox is dramatic. It is vivid. It is chilling.

You deign to step into the United States protesting the loss of your clients’ “rights” to input the market place of ideas, but yet do nothing to challenge the theft of parallel opportunity and redress for millions of Palestinians and their supporters in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. A system of Israeli opportunity and justice owned not by principles of equality, diversity and aspiration but by a military crowned with the hateful tiara of the Knesset that proclaims and proudly so …. For Jews only.

At days-end, Zionists promote the tattered tease of a fanciful “democracy” all the time obscuring a faith-based privilege of an Israeli justice system empowered by a “Nation state” … one that exalts Judaism over the faith of all others. It is a legislative badland that has welcomed some 65 laws that favor Jews alone. A grand judicial censor that upheld the deportation of Human Rights Watch director Omar Shakir who was removed from Israel for nothing more than his call on firms to cease operations in settlements. Several weeks ago, that same judicial process cheered for the forced exile of Palestinian-French human rights lawyer Salah Hammouri, who had been detained without charges much of this year.

It is perverse to say the least that while its packages itself as a democracy Israel continues its decades old practice requiring all media outlets, authors and publishers to submit articles “relating” to security and foreign relations to military censors for pre-publication review.

Last year “the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 129 articles in the media, and interfered with the content of another 1,313.” At the same time the Israel Democracy Institute and the Israel Internet Association challenged a new regulation that empowered the state to obtain a court order permitting Israel to block any website posts including those on Google, Twitter and Facebook or any Israeli news sites or those outside of Israel for content removal from Israeli IP addresses on the grounds that a post could serve as an “incitement to violence or terror.” Currently there are hundreds of books banned by Israel either because of content or place of publication. This includes Arabic translations of George Orwell, James Joyce and William Faulkner; of Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag and Nelson Mandela; of Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Orhan Pamuk, and Agatha Christie.

This year Israel announced a new “Procedure for Entry and Residency of Foreigners in Judea and Samaria Region,” which provides the Israeli military the unilateral power to select which international academics, researchers and students can teach, do research or study at Palestinian universities. Given however increasing military attacks over the last several years at various Palestinian universities such as An-Najah, Birzeit and Palestine Technical University — Kadoorie in which dozens of students have been shot or arrested as “inciters” it just might be fortuitous these days for foreign applicants to be denied admission to Palestine to teach, research or attend classes. As part of its effort to control what Palestinian students can access in classrooms and out Israel has accelerated its effort to control the content and language of what is taught in Palestinian classrooms.

Elsewhere there are increasing on-line efforts to control what is taught and by whom outside Israel. Recently Zoom, Facebook and Youtube blocked an online academic event “ Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?” co-sponsored by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program at San Francisco State University, the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUFCA), and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).”

Meanwhile dozens of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian organizations, faculty, researchers and teaching assistants are under siege at various American universities- with many shuttered, denied tenure or fired through lobbying efforts to bully and silence them. While attacks by Zionist entities on famed academics such as Steven Salaita and Norman Finkelstein are well known, Israel itself has never hesitated to try and muzzle what can and cannot be taught about its colonial project in US classrooms. The matter of the University of Carolina Ph.D. student Kylie Broderick speaks volumes about its calculated effort to control academic content:

“Israeli consular officials in the southeast U.S. arranged meetings with a dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to discuss a graduate student teaching a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to two UNC professors with knowledge of the meetings, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, the Israeli official accused the Ph.D. student of antisemitism and said she was unfit to teach the course.”

For years the Israeli government with its global lobbyists and Zionist supplicants have tried to recast any challenge to Israel’s blatant violation of fundamental human rights and international law as “anti-Semitism.”

Though activists worldwide including Jews have confronted not Judaism but supremacist policies born of terrorism, nurtured by land theft and violence and heralded by a consummate system of Israeli Apartheid, it has not slowed the orchestrated effort to refabricate BDS and other non-violent efforts as little more than hatred of Jews. It is a constant: be it the fitted shroud over the human rights graveyards of Israel, or the corrupted screams of its crusaders, Zionists seek to define an acceptable marketplace of ideas through the crafted and cheap talisman of antisemitism.

It is this vile revision of political aim and purpose empowered by the call of human rights and justice for millions of targeted and displaced Palestinians that has fueled insidious attacks on nothing more than pure speech and protest. Across the globe, principled voices have been slandered with countless singled out for prosecution and economic injury not for violence but righteous resistance against the heirs of a racist colonial project- one more hateful than ever with the tally of its most recent election.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism has been auctioned off as the universal bellwether of hate. That this chant has been taken up by some, perhaps many, does not make the brand itself any less tailored, dishonest or insufferable. At its core, this marketing ploy is entirely irrelevant to settled US law and little more than mere deflection. Indeed, it is an interesting paradox that so many who decried as clichéd the UN General Assembly resolution which “determined that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” half a century later, themselves, reduce all who oppose Zionism as inescapably anti-Semitic.

In the United States dozens of laws have been passed to sanction those who support BDS or oppose Israeli policies by way of other non-violent iterations. Against the backdrop of the convenient mantra “they hate us, because we are Jews” … or “self-hating Jews” … students, faculty, journalists, political activists and businesses alike have been intimidated and silenced; have lost employment; or been forced to spend limited resources to defend themselves against a finely fueled and funded attack by Zionist hawkers ultimately underwritten by the political or financial coffers of Israel.

So let us walk forward not with empty words but open eyes. For more than a century boycotts worldwide have served as an peoples’ alarm against policies and practices that have not just mocked human rights, dignity and justice, but taken the liberty and lives of tens of millions for little more than their faith, skin tone or political beliefs. Be it the voice of Jews against the arrival of Hitler; Americans who toppled Jim Crow; a world that said no to the Boers of South Africa; or the principled refusal by many across the globe to accept a supremacist Zionist nation state today, boycotts have been the historical foundation of international resistance.

The universal right of self-determination is a fundamental cornerstone of international law and human rights. With this no principled person or schooled scholar can disagree. At its core stands a settled age-old collective norm that people and movements can confront, indeed must defy, political and economic power born of religious, cultural or historical supremacy. To do otherwise is to surrender to the deadly tyranny of majoritarian rule and eventual ethnic cleanse. Nowhere is that call more compelling today than it is as against Israel, a racist colonial project.

Legendary Anarchist Emma Goldman born of an Orthodox Jewish family in Lithuania was not opposed to Jewish migration to Palestine, but only as a welcome refuge from the growing clouds of European national socialism. She was however an ardent anti-Zionist seeing “Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish state with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police militarism… in other words a Jewish state machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.”

Goldman, who was imprisoned in the United States on multiple occassions for inciting to riot, urging draft resistance and illegal distribution of information about birth control, and who was deported to Russia for sedition following the Palmer Raids, understood well that principled resistance exacts a heavy personal price, to be sure. For those who fight Zionism all these years later, be it through BDS or other forms of struggle, Goldman left behind sage words of inspiration which echo from the historical pathways of resistance:

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause. If, then, from time immemorial, the New has met with opposition and condemnation, why should my beliefs be exempt from a crown of thorns?

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.
You can no longer follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw

Seeking Justice In The Name Of Hate ✒ In Defense of BDS

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