Oct. 17, 2023 ❧ 1 million+ forcibly displaced in Gaza, Wisconsin's battle for democracy, and a Kaiser Permanente labor deal
Plus horrors in the US prison system, gerrymandering, Australia's indigenous rights referendum, possible baby-snatching in Congress, and more!
BIG STORY
PANIC, HORROR, AND DESTRUCTION AS ISRAEL ORDERS MASS EVACUATION OF MORE THAN 1 MILLION GAZANS
[CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE AND GRAPHIC MEDICAL IMAGERY]
Since Israel’s siege of Gaza began last weekend more than 2,670 Palestinians have been killed and 9,600 wounded according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, as of yesterday. Early this afternoon, the AP and Reuters also reported that Israel has bombed a hospital, which the health ministry says killed 500 more Palestinians.
[UPDATE: Since the publication of this briefing, many news organizations have amended initial reports that Israel was responsible for the bombing. At the current moment, it is unclear whether the explosion was the result of an Israeli airstrike or a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket.]
The Israeli military bombarded the territory with more than 6,000 bombs in the first six days, flattened homes, apartment buildings, offices, refugee camps, mosques, and even hospitals. More than 1 million Palestinians have been displaced since the bombing began and another 175,000 have taken shelter in protected facilities run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, though the UNRWA says they have also been bombed and some of its workers have been killed.
As it massed more than 300,000 soldiers for a ground invasion and began some localized raids, Israel ordered 1.1 million people in North Gaza to relocate to the South with a 24-hour warning early on Friday, in what Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called a “second Nakba,” referring to the mass displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 during the founding of Israel.
“We are going to attack Gaza City very broadly soon,” said Israel’s chief military spokesman. The United Nations urged Israel to reverse the order, with a spokesman warning that such a massive exodus would be “impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Many people have been left with nowhere to stay and no means of traveling except by foot, as fuel and electricity have been cut off and many roads have been destroyed. As Noor Harazin, a freelance journalist in Gaza, said in an interview with NPR:
I was one of the luckiest people to get a car and basically move from Gaza to southern Gaza with a car. But we saw hundreds of people taking this route on their feet. And you're talking about tens of kilometers. And I saw women crying and children crying. And people are shocked.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that civilians “who want to save their lives” will have no choice but to leave. However, even those who have followed Israel’s orders have not been safe. Israel bombed a convoy of 70 people, mostly women and children as it was fleeing via a “safe route” to the Southern part of Gaza. Many Gazans now fear evacuating, according to The Guardian. According to Agnes Camlard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International:
[The evacuation order] has sowed panic among the population and left thousands of internally displaced Palestinians now sleeping on the streets, not knowing where to flee to or where they can find safety amid a relentless bombing campaign.
Hospital workers, meanwhile, are faced with an impossible decision on whether to evacuate thousands of patients to the South, where hospitals are already overflowing. Rather than abandoning their patient. Many hospital workers have bravely chosen to stay in the North, risking their own lives to care for their patients. The International Red Cross Red Crescent, which has already had five of its paramedics killed by Israeli attacks issued a statement condemning the transfer order, saying “Our volunteers refuse to leave and abandon those who need them most. They must be protected so that they can protect others.” The hospital workers who stay behind have no guarantee of safety, even though attacking medical personnel is a flagrant violation of international law. Over the first five days, there were 30 recorded instances of attacks on health facilities, ambulances, and health workers, according to a report by the Geneva-based nonprofit Insecurity Insight.
The UN calls the transfer order “a death sentence for the sick and injured,” including those in intensive care and on hemodialysis, pregnant women, and babies in incubators. Amid the blockade on water, food, fuel, and electricity, hospitals are nearly out of basic supplies. Dr. Mohammed Qandeel, a consultant at Nasser Hospital, in the southern town of Khan Younis, told the AP that if fuel runs out, “it means the whole health system will be shut down. All these patients are in danger of death if the electricity is cut off.”
Under international law, the forced transfer of a population is considered a war crime punishable by the International Criminal Court. So is the targeting of civilians and civilian objects without a clear military necessity to do so. Just as Hamas was guilty of war crimes when it attacked Israeli civilians last week, Israel is guilty of them now. Last week the Biden administration rightly expressed horror and outrage at Hamas’ atrocities, “This was an act of sheer evil. More than 1,000 civilians slaughtered — not just killed, slaughtered — in Israel.” The U.S. is now helping Israel carry out an even more destructive assault on the people of Gaza, moving aircraft and artillery into the region, while U.S. special operations forces are now helping Israel conduct strategy. According to a memo obtained by the Huffington Post, the State Department has urged diplomats not to use terms including “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed,” or “restoring calm” to describe the situation in Palestine. In other words, America’s policy on civilian deaths appears to be that if Israeli civilians die, it’s an unspeakable atrocity, but if more than twice as many Palestinians die, it doesn’t even qualify as violence or bloodshed. Meanwhile, Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has described calls for a ceasefire as “disgraceful” and “repugnant.” As our editor Nathan J. Robinson wrote yesterday in Current Affairs:
In the U.S., a defining characteristic of public discourse is extreme hypocrisy, righteously condemning the terror perpetrated by other countries while either ignoring or rationalizing the terror inflicted by our own mighty military machine. Defenders of Israel are quite similar, rightly being enraged by Hamas’ killing of Israel’s children but quick to justify the equally gruesome killing of Palestinian children as a mere tragic necessity…
…I begin from the principle that every child counts equally. And I recognize that if you care only when certain children die, the idea that you are motivated by sympathy for children is called into question. Israel is currently carrying out acts in Gaza that are just as repellent as those committed by Hamas. It does so in the context of being the aggressor power in its conflict with Palestine. Nobody should be taken seriously who is not equally appalled by the violence rained down on Gaza as they are by the crimes recently carried out against Israel.
YOU CAN HELP
The latest round of bombings has left thousands of children in desperate need of aid and deprived of basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. Please click the link below to donate to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund—which has provided humanitarian aid to children of Gaza for more than 30 years.
STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT TAKES UP CASE ON THE STATE’S ABSURD PARTISAN GERRYMANDER
The Wisconsin state legislature has one of the most lopsided gerrymanders in the country. Despite receiving just under 54 percent of the statewide popular vote in the last election, Republicans control 64 of 99 seats in the state assembly and 22 of 33 state senate seats, which gives them a supermajority that can override vetoes by the state’s Democratic governor. Even in Democratic wave years, like 2018—where Democrats won the state popular vote by more than 8 points, Republicans still held onto nearly two-thirds of the seats. According to calculations by Sam Wang, a professor of neuroscience and the head of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project:
The Senate has a remarkably low vote threshold to attain a legislative majority, 44.1% Republican. The threshold is even lower, 43.4%, in the Assembly, whose districts are based on Senate districts. These numbers are farther from 50% than any other swing state. In short, by the criterion of antimajoritarianism, Wisconsin’s legislature is the most gerrymandered in the nation. To reach a Senate supermajority, Republicans only need 47.5% of the statewide vote - still several points short of a majority. This advantage is highly asymmetric: to get a supermajority, Democrats would need 11 points more, or 58.4%.
The resulting supermajority, immune from public opinion, can engage in extreme behavior without paying a price in terms of political power,” Wang says. Wisconsin Republicans have used their unchecked authority to reinstate a 19th-century abortion ban that punishes women with up to six years in jail (though this is currently being blocked by a state circuit court). They have turned Wisconsin—formerly a hotspot of labor activism—into a right-to-work state with harsh restrictions on unions. They have also made it harder to vote by mail and passed a hugely restrictive voter-ID law that was found to have reduced turnout by 200,000 votes and most severely impacted Black voters. Despite being a swing state that voted for Biden in 2020, Wisconsin is the closest thing to an honest-to-goodness right-wing dictatorship in the country.
How did this come to be? Following the red wave of 2010, Wisconsin’s newly Republican legislature was in charge of redrawing electoral districts and did so in a way that ensured their iron grip over the legislature regardless of the will of voters ever since. The maps were challenged at various points during the 2010s, but the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2019 that it would not rule on the matter of whether partisan gerrymandering was constitutional, thus kicking the question back to Wisconsin’s conservative Supreme Court, which of course, verified Republicans’ right to rule the state in perpetuity. During redistricting in 2020, they further refined their partisan gerrymander, with works of art like Assembly District 73, which was taken from this relatively normal blob shape to looking like the outline of a t-rex.
However, the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz earlier this year flipped the court in liberals’ favor for the first time in 15 years. Last week, the state Supreme Court agreed to once again hear a case challenging Wisconsin’s gerrymandered maps, which newly-elected Justice Protasiewicz has been an outspoken critics, saying they are “rigged” and “They do not reflect people in this state. I don't think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair.”
In a last-ditch attempt to save Republicans’ one-party control, Assembly Speaker Janet Vos has threatened to impeach Protasiewicz unless she recuses herself from the case, claiming that her statements on the issue of gerrymandering constitute “pre-judgment.” This is absurd. Supreme Court justices make their opinions on issues known all the time because they are not appointed, but elected. As Christine Fernando and Harm Venhiuzen pointed out in the Associated Press:
One conservative justice frequently spoke out in favor of gun rights during her campaign, even producing a political mailer showing her brandishing a shotgun and wearing a hat promoting the NRA. Another had previously called Planned Parenthood, a frequent litigant in abortion cases, a “wicked organization.”
Thankfully, Protasiewicz has not given into these intimidation tactics and has said she will not recuse herself. The desperate threats to impeach Protasiewicz seem to indicate that Republicans are genuinely scared of what could happen if they were to lose their structural advantage. It would require them for the first time in more than a decade to actually face a competitive election.
FIGHTING BACK
KAISER PERMANENTE WORKERS REACH TENTATIVE DEAL
Less than a month after they launched the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history, the employees of Kaiser Permanente have secured a tentative deal. As the word “tentative” suggests, the agreement still needs to be approved by the more than 85,000 members of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, with a ratification process scheduled to begin October 18; until then, nothing is set in stone. Still, if and when it goes through, the proposed four-year contract contains some major gains for workers.
Among other concessions to labor, Kaiser Permanente has agreed to a 21 percent pay increase over the next four years, with a minimum wage of $23 an hour nationwide and $25 in California. According to NPR, there will also be “new restrictions on hiring subcontractors and using outside firms for temporary staffing,” requiring the firm to create stable, well-paid union jobs rather than a patchwork of stopgap measures. Not only are these policies good for workers, but they’ll help to address the crisis of understaffing in the healthcare industry at large, which has left medical professionals stressed, overworked, and liable to make dangerous mistakes.
In their infinite wisdom, the New York Times and Bloomberg have given a great deal of the credit to the Biden administration’s acting Labor Secretary, Julie Su, for “helping broker the tentative deal.” And, yes, Su did travel to California to take an active hand in the negotiations. But this win belongs to the workers, and the workers alone. By standing together, and refusing to take “no” for an answer, they’ve scored an important victory—not just for themselves, but for their patients, who can now expect a higher standard of care. And they didn’t do it through polite conversations with management, but by the threat of a further strike in November. For working people in every industry, it’s an example to learn from and build upon.
🙞 LONG READ 🙝
Just days before the latest round of violence broke out between Israel and Gaza, Mondoweiss published a review of the book When They Speak Israel: A Guide to Clarity in Conversations About Israel by Alex McDonald. In the review, Steve France gives a useful overview of “Israelspeak,” which is McDonald’s word for “the web of misleading cliches and tropes that have driven Zionist narratives deep into the American consciousness,” and discusses how such rhetorical tricks can be disarmed:
Like taking the “blue pill” in The Matrix, which makes characters believe that their totally simulated lives are real, Israelspeak deludes listeners, often by tapping into unspoken narratives and emotions.
Activists for Palestinian human rights are all too familiar with Israelspeak. McDonald’s book lists many of its gambits and comebacks. “Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself?” (or a “right to exist?”). Also, “Your view is unbalanced,” “Why are you singling out Israel?” “We should support the only democracy in the Middle East.” “When Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians, they responded by shooting rockets at Israel,” and the always-lurking accusations and insinuations of anti-Semitism.
McDonald responds to Israelspeak with a two-step process: First, connect with listeners by becoming a good listener yourself. Find out the specific beliefs and reasoning that underlie their support for Israel and distrust of Palestinians. This step might seem like normalization – which Jonathan Kuttab has defined as conversations that “bring Jews and Arabs together under highly controlled conditions apparently aimed at promoting co-existence without truly addressing or challenging the underlying injustice.” McDonald’s approach, however, goes far beyond this first step.
Step two of the process gets trickier. Now the goal is to gently but firmly raise facts, that reveal Israel’s racism and ask how such facts square with the notion that Israel is fair to Palestinians. In Matrix terms, you clarify which particular blue pills (unsound facts, beliefs, and logic) underlie your conversation partner’s Zionist position and then offer the appropriate red pill antidotes.
Here, for example, is how to neutralize and, indeed, “turn around” the following bit of Israelspeak: “Why are you singling out Israel for criticism” (in a world full of other governments that violate human rights)?
First, confirm that your partner “knows that Israel is a human rights violator,” which actually is implied by the Israelspeak question itself; (2) clarify that you do in fact criticize other violators; (3) ask if they shield violators other than Israel from criticism; and finally, (4) ask why they single out Israel for protection. As always, you must be clear that you oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Jewish racism, and are not “pro-Palestinian,” merely “pro-equality.”
It’s enjoyable to see how McDonald dissolves hoary Zionist barbs in a gentle but persistent rain of refutation and contextualization. In effect, the book provides a splendid parade of “gotchas.” However, McDonald rules out the gotcha attitude. No matter how tempting to activists, any snarkiness damages the chance for a productive exchange. He is intent on sincere, respectful conversation with Zionists and their sympathizers, as long as they, too, speak in good faith. He counsels readers not to waste time with people “who are conscious of Israel’s racism yet support the state nonetheless.” In his opinion, that still leaves many potential interlocutors, because “most Zionists are good people,” who sincerely oppose racism but have been taught that support for Israel is justified — if not a solemn moral duty. They have yet to realize that Israel initiated and actively engages in racism and human rights violations.
Check out When They Speak Israel: A Guide to Clarity in Conversations About Israel by Alex McDonald
AROUND THE STATES
[CONTENT WARNING: Prison abuse/Neglect]
❧ The ACLU is suing the state of Delaware over negligent medical care in its prison system. In the lawsuit, filed on behalf of more than a dozen prisoners, the organization alleges that Delaware authorities have “systemically violated their duties to ensure adequate health care” through a consistent pattern of “unlawful and unconstitutional delays and denials of treatment.” In one particularly grim case, a 61-year-old man named Harry Samuel “began to bleed from his rectum and penis in late November,” but wasn’t given a colonoscopy until July of the following year, at which point prison doctors discovered that “the meritless delays had resulted in terminal prostate and rectal cancer.” A more clear-cut violation of someone’s Eighth Amendment rights would be hard to imagine. If it weren’t for the state’s neglect, Samuel’s condition might not have become terminal, making this a case of wrongful death as well. If anyone involved has even a shred of conscience left, the ACLU suit will result in serious reforms—but it also serves as a reminder that the whole filthy edifice of incarceration is irredeemable, and needs to be done away with.
❧ A Trump-appointed judge has ruled that Galveston, Texas’ electoral map violates the Voting Rights Act. According to the ruling by District Judge Jeffery Brown, the city’s 2021 map “denie[d] Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process” by breaking up the only precinct where they made up the majority of the electorate, which would have effectively erased their representation in a county that is 45 percent non-White. It’s the first voting discrimination ruling of its kind since the Supreme Court’s surprising (but welcome) decision in Allen v. Milligan this summer to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting laws. Congratulations, Supreme Court, you did something right! Don’t let it go to your head.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Sanctions relief for Venezuela may be in the works, according to reporting in Bloomberg. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the publication claims that the U.S. and Venezuela are “close to reaching an understanding” that would lift at least some of the crushing sanctions imposed on the smaller country. In exchange, the Biden administration would demand that President Nicholas Maduro remove bans on particular candidates for office, most notably opposition leader María Corina Machado, and release an undetermined number of political prisoners. If a deal really can be struck—and the anonymous source, together with the long history of U.S. hostility to Venezuela, leaves room for doubt—it would mean much-needed relief for the country’s poor and working people, who have suffered bitterly under the sanctions regime.
For more on how U.S. sanctions have impacted life in Venezuela, check out this panel discussion with foreign policy experts and activists in Al Jazeera:
❧ Australian voters have resoundingly voted down a proposal that would have given its Indigenous peoples a “Voice to Parliament.” Only 40 percent voted in favor of the measure, which would have officially recognized these groups as Australia’s first peoples and given them a body to advise the national legislature. As we discussed in a previous briefing, Australia’s more than 800,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “still face stark inequality—they are disproportionately poor, more likely to be incarcerated, and have a life expectancy of eight years less than non-Indigenous Australians,” following their systematic dispossession during British colonization. Majority-indigenous polling catchments voted 63 percent in support of the measure. Pro-Voice aboriginal activist Jill Gallagher told The Sydney Morning Herald, “I am feeling a little bit devastated, actually. I thought Australia had matured over 230 years, but obviously not.” But indigenous views on the Voice were mixed, with others—calling themselves the “progressive no” bloc, saying that it granted symbolic power while doing little to grant indigenous people the material equality they’ve been deprived of.
🙞 CROOKS vs. SICKOS 🙝
(or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ A thoroughly baffling exchange took place on Capitol Hill this weekend between the embattled Congressman George Santos (R-NY) and a pro-Palestinian activist, who confronted him about his support for the “ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israelis.” Santos (who has famously lied about being Jewish and having family members who survived the Holocaust, before claiming he never said he was Jewish but “Jew-ish”) responded to the questioning with a verbal carpet-bombing, bellowing “YOU ARE A TERRORIST SYMPATHIZER!” When the man explained that he is a descendant of displaced Palestinians, Santos howled, “I DON’T CARE! YOU ARE HUMAN SCUM!”
Making the matter even more bizarre was the fact that when the confrontation began, Santos was holding a two-month-old baby. When reporters later asked what happened, Santos screeched, “THE NEXT TIME HE TRIES TO ACCOST ME WITH A CHILD IN MY HANDS, I WANT HIM OUT OF HERE! HE’S AN ANIMAL!”
Let’s leave aside Santos’ utterly deranged, dehumanizing response to a very reasonable question. What is the deal with this random baby?
Before the confrontation broke out, Santos was seen carrying the baby from Congressman Tim Burchett’s (R-TN) office, according to The New York Sun’s Matt Rice, who later reported that the baby belonged to a Santos staffer. When asked if it was his baby, Santos ominously replied, “Not yet!”...
Ummmmm….What is that supposed to mean??? In most situations, one would assume that he was just making a quip about his desire to adopt the little cherub. But given Santos’ voluminous history of small-time hornswoggling—including allegedly making up fake charities and stealing donors’ credit card info—there is a non-zero possibility that he intended to snatch this baby and sell him to a pawn shop for another Burberry scarf.
❧ Santos was not the only elected representative to say something totally indefensible and insane about the Israel-Palestine conflict this week. He was arguably eclipsed by Democratic New Jersey Congressman Josh Gottheimer. According to colleagues, who were discussing the decision of Muslim faith leaders not to attend an interfaith vigil for Israeli and Palestinian victims, Gottheimer reportedly said, “It’s because they’re guilty,” before being confronted by Texas Democrat Greg Casar. When the statement leaked out to the press, Gottheimer did not apologize, instead denying he ever said it, calling it an “anti-Israel fueled smear campaign.” It’s just one of numerous examples over the last week that have echoed the bloodlust Americans displayed after 9/11. Like Senator Lindsay Graham, who earlier this week said Israel should “level the place,” referring to Gaza, Gottheimer shows that the attitude that all Muslims are guilty of the worst crimes committed by people of their faith is still deeply rooted in American political culture.
WASP FACT OF THE WEEK
There is a wasp in Australia whose scientific name is “Aha ha!”
Being a wasp expert is, it seems, a thankless job. No one holds ticker-tape parades or throws extravagant banquets in your honor. You have to amuse yourself wherever you can, and in 1977, entomologist Arnold Menke did just that. Legend has it that Menke opened a box of insect specimens, saw an unusual wasp, and proclaimed “Aha! A new genus!,” to which a fellow entomologist replied with a doubtful “Ha.” Secure in his judgment, Menke then named the wasp “Aha ha.” (He also got AHA HA vanity license plates for his car, which might be carrying things a little far.)
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.