Dear friends--
I hope this finds you well?
If you want to jump straight on down to the latest exciting news from our "PalCast" podcast, then click here. Otherwise, keep reading here and you'll come to it later.
... On Thursday morning, northern Gaza saw the horrifying sight of Israeli tanks, that were prowling near the place where desperately needed food aid was to be delivered, opening fire on the Gazans who had camped all night to await the aid and then, as they scattered in disarray, some of the tanks ran right over them. More than 112 Gazans were reported killed and a further 700-plus injured.
In response to the waves of international outrage, Pres. Biden said he was planning to have the U.S. military deliver aid to that region via air-drops. All the relevant experts have noted that such a method of delivering aid is just a "drop" in the bucket of the many searing needs the people have, and useful mainly for the photo-ops it provides (as we saw with the handful of earlier air-drops into Gaza organized by the Jordanians or the UAE.)
Two quick comments here, then I'll dive into the rest of the news from Just World Ed. The first comment is that on January 26 the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to start allowing all needed humanitarian aid into Gaza as part of the efforts to prevent the continued commission of genocide there. But the record from the UN as shown in the infographic above shows that the average daily number of trucks the Israelis have allowed into Gaza since January 26 (the green line there) has been about the same as, or less than, before.
Bear in mind that before October 7, the average number of trucks allowed in was ~00 per day.
The second thing to note is that the whole decision on how much aid to allow into Gaza has remained now-- as it has for the past 57 years-- in the hands of Israel, which is the "belligerent occupying power". there, under international law. The U.S.government, as far and away Israel's most significant backer, has considerable leverage to affect (or indeed to force) Israel's decisionmaking on this and all other Palestine-related matters... but Pres. Biden has thus far chosen not to use that leverage. At all.
As for the orders of the ICJ or the many rulings on Gaza or other Palestine-related matters issued by other UN bodies over the years? Israel has thus far felt at ease to completely ignore them. And Washington has-- thus far-- completely allowed it to do so.
|
|
In recent weeks this country, the United States, has seen a steadily rising tide of revulsion at our government's active complicity in Israel's unspeakably cruel genocide in Gaza. Just in recent days we have seen the "Uncommitted" movement of Democratic voters in Michigan win an unprecedented 110,000 votes in the state's Democratic Party primary, from voters quite unwilling to give Pres. Biden their support at this time.
![]() And a couple of days before that, we saw the courageous U.S. Airman First Class Aaron Bushnell engage in the time-honored practice of using self-immolation to protest the government's involvement in unspeakable acts of violence overseas. His last words were haunting: "I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all..."
I wrote a short Globalities essay here midweek, looking at the parallels with the self-burning carried out in 1965 by the U.S. Quaker Norman Morrison. I was exploring the effectiveness of Morrison's action at that time (considerable) and also the debates within Quakerism and in his own family over its appropriateness-- which were also considerable.
But my bottom line here is that now, finally, some 21 weeks into this genocide, the extreme and continuing suffering of the people of Gaza and the depth of the cruelty with which Israel has been treating them seem to be touching hearts and affecting actions in many important constituencies throughout the United States and other Western nations, in politically significant ways.
Of course, Israel's cruelty and the resulting Palestinian suffering have been touching hearts and affecting political actions throughout the countries of the "Global Majority" for many months already... But the effects on political action-- by the leaders of those countries, and of ours-- have thus far not been sufficient to halt Israel in its tracks. When, oh when will that happen? It will take concerted action by all lovers of humanity-- in the BRICS-plus countries, in the UN Security Council, in the G7 countries, and in all the world's power centers-- for this to happen.
(I started to dive into some of those issues in this Twitter thread that I posted yesterday. More to come.)
|
|
![]() So here's the latest news from our "PalCast" project. On Tuesday, ur guest was Dr. Hadeel Assali, a super-thoughtul, polymathic anthrologist/geologist currently doing a post-doc at (the aptly named) Columbia University-- who is also an exiled Gaza Palestinian. Hadeel contributed a chapter titled "Hyperpresent Absence: Some Suggested Methods" to this recent AUC Press volume on Gaza.
![]() In our conversation with Hadeel, our host Yousef Aljamal, co-host Tony Groves, and I prodded Hadeel to share her some of her takeaways from the research she's conducted into some of Israel's very longstanding plans to dislocate, dispossess, and disperse the population of Gaza. That research was sometimes personal for her: Her own father and other relatives got snookered by the Israeli authorities and their middlemen into leaving Gaza for promised "dream jobs" in Brazil, only to find themselves jobless and abandoned in Uruguay.
On the show, we also discussed the terrible situation in Gaza more broadly-- as well as Aaron Bushnell's then-recent self-immolation here in DC. You can catch this 56-minute ep on Apple, Spotify, or many other platforms. Or you can read a quick digest of what we discussed, on the JWE blog here.
I am really proud that with the PalCast project we've been able to help engage and inform a broad global English-speaking audience about the realities and background of the unfolding tragedy in Gaza-- as well as to give prominent voice to Gaza Palestinians like Yousef, Hadeel, and so many of our other guests.
Please be sure to put the PalCast onto your regular-listening list! We're currently releasing one new episode per week. By listening to the new eps, or cruising through our growing backlist (Spotify, Apple), you'll find you can connect with Gaza Palestinians and their decades-long struggle in. new ways, even while you're at the gym or on a long, otherwise boring commute.
Please be sure to recommend the PalCast to your friends and networks-- and to give it top reviews on your fave listening platform(s), too! That will help us get the broad listenership that the PalCast certainly deserves.
|
|
![]() And by the way, we have a super treat coming up in our next Palcast episode, releasing Wednesday. Our guest will be the luminous Gaza-Palestinian-origined poet Fady Joudeh. We'll be talking to Fady on the same day that his new collection of (Gaza-themed) poems, which is intriguing titled […] will start shipping from Milkweed Editions here in the United States.
Fady is an amazing individual who has published six previous collections of his own poetry. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received numerous other prestigious literary awards. He currently lives in Houston, Texas, where oh, by the way, he is also a practicing physician.
You can learn more about Fady and his work in this recent interview in The Yale Review, or this one, in Boston Review. In the BR interview he talks a little about the terrifying circumstances in which-- during the first three months of the current genocide in Gaza-- he composed the poems in his new volume:
|
|
|
BR: Your new book appears at a moment of unprecedented devastation in Gaza. Can you tell us about the circumstances of its composition? What was it like to write this book—and at this moment?
FJ: It wasn’t a conscious decision to write this book. I couldn’t help it. I needed to survive the hours of experiencing my annihilation livestreamed. Catching my cousin, for example, wail over her two killed sons. Corresponding with writers who Israel later assassinated, or who disappear into silence. I wrote most of the poems and composed the entire book in the months of October through December last year, the first three months of the carnage of Gaza. To do so is as much a reflection on my life as a writer as it is on my being as a Palestinian, especially in English.
|
|
|
I am so honored that my PalCast co-conspirators Yousef, Tony, and I will get to talk to Fady Joudeh this Tuesday. Note: If you've already signed up to Follow the the PalCast on your fave platform before then, you will get the news of the new episode the very moment that it drops!
... And also ahead in my near future is my visit to the London Book Fair, which runs March 12-14.
As I noted in last week's newsletter, one of my main goals in attending LBF this year is to explore foreign-rights deals for all of Just World Books's powerful titles by Gaza-Palestinian authors, other Palestinian authors, and Zionism-questioning Jewish authors from Israel and elsewhere.
Here in case you missed them last week are the two sides of the brochure that I'll be taking there:
|
|
By the way since I'm going to London, I made separate versions of the brochure in US Letter-size and A4 versions. Click on either of those download it in PDF form. I don't give the full bibliographic details there, such as might be needed by a prospective book buyer. But you can easily grab all the relevant biblio details off our website, or find the books for sale on any significant retail platform.
One thing we want to achieve at Just World Books these days is to preserve and extend the fine legacy of our author and friend Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was brutally murdered by the Israeli military last December. And as part of this support for his legacy, we want to maximize the amount of royalties we can collect and then transmit to his widow and family. Any help you can give in this campaign would be very much appreciated.
I want to send a shout-out to two publications that have published elegant literary translations of Dr. Refaat's poignant poem "If I Must Die" on their websites:
- This one, into Spanish, by D.P. Snyder, on "World Literature Today", and
- This one, into Yiddish, by A.C. Weaver, on "In Geveb, A journal of Yiddish studies."
I'd like to acknowledge with great appreciation that the translators and publishers at both those sites have been assiduous in trying to ensure that Dr. Refaat's family receives a due stipend for their use of his work, and to report that Just World Books has been gratefully working with them to enable this to happen.
We are hoping of course that other publishers and translators who have been making use of Dr. Refaat's work will follow those great examples. Please contact me if you want to know how to do this.
|
|
Meantime, Just World Educational remains a separate entity-- one that does not publish books on a royalty-based model. But we do what we can in other ways to help build the informed global public that humankind now so desperately needs.
Right now, JWE is focusing on three main categories of projects: Our amazing "PalCast" podcast series; keeping our blog and all the other super resources on our website as up-to-date as possible; and my writings on the Globalities platform, which is a project of Just World Ed.
I suppose you could also add the work I do once a week (or sometimes more frewuently) on these newsletters as another JWE project, since they do take some real time and thought to pull together.
Big thanks to the many of you who seem to have been sharing them pretty widely. (Which can easily be done using the "Sharing" options provided below.) And if you've been the recipient of such sharing but want to sign up to receive them directly from me, know that you can do so here.
Of course, running all these projects takes real resources!
Our big thanks to the many supporters who have sent donations to Just World Ed recently-- and of course, to those who have signed up to make regular monthly donations. But if you want to support our mission and have not contributed recently, you can find out how to do so by clicking the button below. (Donorbox, Paypal, credit cards, checks... all are welcomed with our considerable gratitude.)
You stay well. Ceasefire in Gaza Now! Ceasefire in Ukraine Now! Let's free ourselves from the grisly grip of the military-industrial complex!
~ Helena
|
|
|
|