Must-Reads and Some Thoughts on Palestine, Disruption and Condemnation

If you want to read some of my current thoughts on Palestine, disruption, and condemnation, you can scroll down to the final thoughts section of this newsletter. If you're here for my weekly, curated must-reads list, read on.

Must-Reads

From right-wing miracle cure scams to Cori Bush, Kamala Harris getting interrupted, and the defense of communities that are under attack, here are some of the most important stories I’ve read this week.

• Commentary: Hillbillies Don’t Need an Elegy, but the Mountains Might by Junior Walk. “Vance wears the term hillbilly like a costume, but I can see through it. You want to know how? A hillbilly wouldn’t bend the knee and kiss the ring, not for a coal company, and certainly not for a wannabe dictator from New York City who’s been handed everything in his life on a silver platter.”
• “A Vote Against Democracy”: Missouri Forces One City to Lock In More Money for Police by Daniel Nichanian. “The fights over who controls these cities’ police departments dates back much further, to the Civil War and its aftermath; in both cases, the separate decisions to limit local control were steeped in efforts to thwart civil rights.”
• Tim Walz’s Green Resume Has an Oily Stain by Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson. “Peltier said that Walz not only allowed Line 3 to go forward—a decision she described as ‘devastating’—he supported a police force who often engaged in violent tactics against protesters engaging in peaceful direct action. In some instances, federal police helicopters sand-blasted Indigenous protesters, while state police surveilled water protectors and journalists. Nearly 900 people overall were arrested during the Line 3 protests.”
• Alaska Tribes Ask for International Intervention on Canadian Mining by Joaqlin Estus. “A group of Southeast Alaska tribes requested on Aug. 1 that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights order a temporary pause on Canadian mining activity. They say ‘reckless’ mining activity violates their human rights.”
• Here’s Why Two Protesters Interrupted Kamala Harris—In Their Own Words by Najib Aminy. “‘If she is expecting to come to Michigan—because it is such a crucial swing state in the election—she must understand that there is a primary issue for Michigan voters,’ [said Hamamy].”
• Racked by Pain and Enraptured by a Right-Wing Miracle Cure by Eli Saslow. “On the other end of his phone were hundreds of people in a live voice chat for Patriot Party News, one of about a dozen far-right media platforms that has grown in both size and influence over the past few years, not only by creating an ecosystem of disinformation but also by providing an authentic sense of community.”
• A National Tenants Union Has Arrived by Rebecca Burns. “Five tenants unions from around the country convened Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in 40 years.”
• The Future Before Us by Blake Strode. “Cori Bush’s defeat is a microcosm of the difficulties in sustaining a political movement born in an insurgency.”
• We Protected Our Community From a Far Right Mob, Here's What Happened by Frankie Larsen. “We waved at the families in the windows of the hotel who continued looking down. Mothers still visibly shaken seemed relieved to see they were well protected. Children threw out heart symbols with their hands. The night dragged on and slowly but surely the far right toddled off. We had done it. For this day at least, in our city, we'd won.”

Final Thoughts

On Wednesday, video footage was released on an Israeli news channel documenting the rape of a Palestinian captive by Israeli soldiers. The assault occurred at the Sde Teiman concentration camp in the Naqab desert, where Israeli forces have detained and tortured hundreds of Palestinians captured in Gaza. The camp was established after October 7 and has been used to imprison Palestinians deemed “administrative detainees” – a classification that requires no charge, evidence, or trial. On July 29, ten soldiers were arrested for their alleged roles in the assault. When word of the arrests broke, angry, pro-military mobs stormed Sde Teiman, demanding the release of the soldiers. Some government ministers reportedly participated in the mayhem. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded criminal penalties for whoever leaked the video, saying that whoever made evidence of the rape public “intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.” Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, said it was shameful for Israel to arrest “our best heroes.”

Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, responded to questions about whether it was acceptable “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum” by saying, “If he is a Nukhba [a Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

On Israeli television, pundits have debated whether or not rape is an acceptable weapon for Israeli soldiers to wield against Palestinians.

In the United States, Ahmad Abuznaid, Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, has condemned the assault. “The rape of kidnapped Palestinian men by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman concentration camp is among the most brutal, inhumane, and vicious forms of torture possible,” Abuznaid said. “It is an absolute outrage that most U.S. politicians and media outlets have remained silent on these vastly documented genocidal abuses. We are long past the point of no return. The time is now to stop protecting war criminals and stop arming Israel.”

The use of rape as a weapon of war or against prisoners of war is a war crime, regardless of what a combatant or a detainee has been accused of. There is no context in which sexual abuse can be justified and a country whose people are rioting in defense of rape and whose leaders are defending rapists as “our best heroes” should be condemned in no uncertain terms. The fact that Israel has any support at all, given its ongoing depravity and genocidal violence, highlights the hypocrisy of countries like the United States, whose officials have the audacity to pontificate about human rights while facilitating the mass slaughter, torture, and sexual violation of Palestinians. 

Some have characterized the victims of Israel’s torture and sexual violence as Hamas militants. While rape is not an acceptable response to any alleged offense, including participation in armed conflict, these characterizations ignore the reality of who Israel incarcerates. According to a recent UN report, many Palestinians who are currently being detained without charge “were taken into custody while sheltering in schools, hospitals and residential buildings, or at checkpoints during the forced displacement of large numbers of Palestinians from north to south Gaza.” UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk, whose Office released the report, stated, “The staggering number of men, women, children, doctors, journalists and human rights defenders detained since 7 October, most of them without charge or trial and held in deplorable conditions, along with reports of ill-treatment and torture and violation of due process guarantees, raises serious concerns regarding the arbitrariness and the fundamentally punitive nature of such arrests and detention.”

The video released Wednesday offers chilling evidence of what Palestinians and human rights groups have reported for years – that Israeli forces weaponize sexual violence against Palestinians. As many survivors have reported, Palestinians captured by Israeli forces are faced with a spectrum of horrors. The UN and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have documented accounts of severe torture in Israel’s network of concentration camps, including waterboarding, rape, starvation, dog attacks, and denial of medical treatment.

The recent attack, which resulted in the arrest of 10 Israeli soldiers, was only unique in that its exposure prompted a legal response. The mobs that formed in defense of the soldiers charged with rape and the chorus of support the soldiers have received from Israeli officials offer a chilling reminder of how far down the path of genocide and supremacist politics Israel has gone. The United States’ ongoing devotion to a country so committed to genocidal, enthno-nationalist politics should be viewed as an indictment of our own leaders. 

This week, while debates about whether Palestine solidarity protesters should have interrupted Kamala Harris filled my social media feeds, I thought about the Palestinians trapped in those concentration camps. I thought about the lack of coverage Israel’s current rape scandal has received in the US. I wondered if any of the people marveling at Harris’ admonition of the protesters had condemned that assault or the lack of coverage it’s received. There are many ways that people are elevated beyond the bounds of accountability, and such positioning usually involves someone’s perception of self-interest. If Harris would chart a different course, why shouldn’t she be expected to say as much? To expect people to stop raising hell about a genocide because it is politically inconvenient is a cruel dismissal, but it is also politically clownish. In an emergency, people yell. They will not stop yelling, just as you would not stop yelling if your house was on fire and your family was trapped inside. Anyone who wants the yelling to stop must concern themselves with the fire.

As I have watched these debates play out, I also thought about the many reports of sexual violence against Palestinians that have been ignored during this period of active genocide and in the years that led up to it. I thought about the tens of thousands of Palestinians confirmed dead in Gaza, ripped apart by bombs the US government had provided. I thought about the uncounted dead, whose bodies lay under the rubble or whose deaths have simply gone undocumented amid so much destruction and collapse. A study in the Lancet has estimated the number of Palestinian dead at 186,000. Amid so much devastation, murder, depraved cruelty, sexual violation, and starvation, how can anyone raising their voice to demand an end to the genocide be faulted? How can a member of the administration facilitating this nightmare with weapons of war be praised for dismissing those voices? How can the power dynamics between protesters demanding an end to the genocide and the Vice President of the US empire be reduced to “people speaking over a Black woman”? 

If you can look at Israel with shock over their society’s defense of rape, over the civilian blockades that have sought to starve Palestinians, and the mobs that formed to defend rapists who have been cast as “heroes” by political leaders, then you should also take a good look around you and recognize the rot of the very society you inhabit. 

Are those pro-rape mobs so far off in the country that saw the violence of January 6? When I look at Israel and when I look at the mobs that recently attacked immigrants and Muslims in the UK, I see our near future. I realize some people reading these words will think, “Yes, that’s why we cannot elect Donald Trump.” I would agree that Trump must be blocked, but I do not believe that will be enough to save us. We must be clear-eyed about what will be up against in 2025, whether we are ruled by a Democrat or a Republican. (I recommend familiarizing yourself with critiques of Harris and her politics that have been largely erased in this moment.) Our fight is much larger than an electoral moment. If our politics lead us to condemn people crying out for the end of genocide, we are lost. If our politics are not geared toward action, like building the kind of defensive power that mobilized around immigrants in places like Bristol, in the UK, we will be steamrolled by lynch mobs. If we believe that simply clapping and cheering for the electoral circus and condemning anyone who falls out of line will save us, we are fools. If we want to build a better world than this one, if we don’t want to be ruled by monstrous agendas, we have to embody a politics of solidarity. That means evil must be opposed and denounced and that the people calling our attention to it are not the enemy. 

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