Daily Archives: May 16, 2021

Writing in Jacobin this week,Eelam Tamil filmmaker and member of the Tamil Refugee Council, Baranthan Vidhyapathy, saidthe Australian government has whitewashed the atrocities committed by Sri Lanka against Tamilsand "helped equip Sri Lankas state security forces."

Earlier this year, theAustralian government supplied Sri Lankan police with five aerial drones despitesupportinga United Nations resolution just months before,which warned of the deteriorating human rights situation on the island.

"The drones were previously owned by theOperationSovereignBordersJointAgencyTaskForce, part of Australias military-led border security operation whose primary responsibility is to 'deter and disrupt'asylum seekers trying to reach Australia," Vidhyapathy wrote.

"Australiaclaimsthat the drones will be used to support crime-fighting activities. But past experience makes it perfectly clear that the Sri Lankan authorities are likely to use the drones for surveillance of Tamil refugees fleeing the island and government officials in Canberra know it," he added.

Vidhyapathy highlighted that the Australian government previously "provided similar aid that was intended to stop people fleeing."

"On May 13, 2009, as the killings in Mullivaikkal were reaching their peak, the Australian government announced a new aid package for Sri Lanka. With hundreds of thousands of people displaced or held in internment camps around the island, Australiapromisedto spend'$15.1 million over four years establishing posts in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, in an effort to strengthen regional co-operation on people-smuggling.'Like this years gift of drones, the 2009 package was intended to stop people escaping the island."

"Despite overwhelming evidence that theycontinue to face persecution, Eelam Tamils seeking asylum in Australia facesome of the lowest acceptance rates. The Australian authorities have deported many to danger," Vidhyapathy noted.

"Tamil refugees also remain imprisoned in Australian-runonshoreand offshore detention centers.To justify the refoulement of refugees, the Australian government claims that any abuses against Tamil civilians took place as part of a legitimate struggle against a terrorist organization and are now firmly in the past."

"The Left must reject this cynical cover-up and stand in solidarity with Eelam Tamils, recognizing both the genocide committed against them and their right to self-determination. In Australia, this means fighting the deportation of Eelam Tamils to Sri Lanka, freeing all refugeesin onshore and offshore detention, and demanding an end to all military aid to the Sri Lankan state," he concluded.

Read the full piece here.

Continued here:

'Australia Is Supporting the Oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka' - Tamil Guardian

NewsLaurel V WilliamsYesterdayDavid Abdulah -

As the deadly conflict between Israel and the Palestinians intensifies, the political leader of the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ) has called on the Government to immediately suspend all economic, military and other co-operation with the Israeli government until it abides by UN resolutions.

On Thursday, a media statement from David Abdulah said the movement unequivocally expressed its solidarity with the Palestinians. Speaking on behalf of MSJ, Abdulah condemned what he considered Israels continued oppression of the Palestinians.

Abdulah also called on the UN to begin to enforce resolutions that have been passed. He believes the resolutions would see Israel respect the right of Palestinians to establish their own state within the borders of Israel returning to that of the pre-1967 war.

Abdulah added, "We call on the UN Security Council to take steps to bring about peace.

"In particular, we wish to see CARICOM support our member state of St Vincent and the Grenadines, which is currently a non-permanent member of the Security Council, taking the lead in this matter since the western powers such as the US have become so compromised over the years by their biased support for Israel."

He said there would be no peace in the "so-called Middle East" until the Palestinians obtain justice.

"Let us never forget the history the modern state of Israel was artificially created by the western powers in May 1948 following the Second World War and the horrors of the holocaust," Abdulah said.

"To enable this state of Israel, it had to be established within a geographical space and that space was Palestine."

Palestinians who occupied that space suddenly became stateless, homeless, and landless.

The MSJ political leader said by an act of US and British imperialism, millions of Palestinians became refugees.

In 2019 the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reported that of the estimated 5.6 million Palestinian refugees, 1.5 million live in UNRWA refugee camps.

In total, there are more than 60 refugee camps located in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. He said the actual number of Palestinian refugees is likely to be much higher than the 5.6 million.

Israel has been continuously expanding its land and reducing the areas in which Palestinians have been living.

"This has been done through Israels so-called settler policies where Israeli Jews seize lands and homes of Palestinians, evict them and then occupy the seized properties," Abdulah said.

"Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been violently displaced in this way, while lands that were never part of the 1948 borders of the state of Israel have been seized and subsequently settled by Jews."

Abdulah charged that Israelis systematically oppress Palestinians.

"Israels military actions have also resulted in many Palestinians being killed, jailed and harassed just because they are Palestinians. It is racist profiling at its worst," Abdulah said.

"The state of Israel has been exceptionally aggressive in all these acts against Palestinians under the government of the right-wing prime minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu."

Abdulah criticised Netanyahu, who is before the Israeli courts, on multiple corruption charges.

He accused Netanyahu of having no clear mandate from his own citizens to lead his country.

Abdulah charged that during the Donald Trump presidency, Netanyahus aggression intensified. Israel announced that it would move its capital to Jerusalem, a decision supported by the US.

Abdulah said: "This was a clear act of provocation as Jerusalem is a city that has holy sites for three major religions Islam, Christianity and Judaism and therefore it has been understood that to locate the capital of a theocratic state, which Israel in effect is would lead to further polarisation."

Israels most recent attempts to evict Palestinians and Arab-Israelis from their homes in Jerusalem have sparked a major rebellion in other cities in Israel.

"This is not about Israel having the right to defend itself. It is first about Palestinians having the right to self-determination and to regain the lands and properties that Israel has seized," Abdulah said.

"It is about ending the refugee status of millions of people. It is about Palestinians being able to live in hope for a better future for themselves and their children, free of persecution and oppression."

On Thursday afternoon, Reuters reported that at least 67 people had been killed in Gaza since violence escalated on Monday. Seven people were killed in Israel.

The report said world powers had demanded de-escalation and the US said it planned to send an envoy for talks with Israel and Palestinians.

Read more here:

MSJ head to Government: Suspend all relations with Israel - TT Newsday

Something important happened in Israel in May 2021. Not just the fact that Hamas in Gaza surprised the army and the intelligence services, not to mention the government, by its ability to take command of a volatile situation, to hit deep into Israel with precision rocketry, and to impose its agenda on an overwhelmingly more powerful enemy. Not only the fact that the government and police have lost control of much of the country, especially mixed Arab-Jewish cities such as Lod, Ramleh, Jaffa, Acre and east Jerusalem, where conditions close to civil war are now in evidence. Not only the acute failure of the Benjamin Netanyahu government to restore some semblance of normalcy, to say nothing of articulating a viable policy for the future.

All these are there for all to see. But the crucial point is that the deeper currents of life in Israel-Palestine, and above all the regnant delusions that have driven Israeli thinking for the past many decades, have been exposed as never before. What we will witness over the coming weeks is a desperate attempt to reestablish these self-destructive axioms as political norms, despite the disaster they have, unsurprisingly, brought about.

It is not difficult to trace the stages through which the current round of violence evolved. One particularly foolish move was the decision by the new police commissioner, Kobi Shabtai, to barricade the wide steps leading into the Damascus Gate of the Old City in Jerusalem. During Ramadan, these steps are a favourite place for families to celebrate the evening iftar meal. There was no apparent logic to closing them off apart from a wish to humiliate Muslim Palestinians at a particularly sensitive moment. Fiery protests erupted. Eventually, the police removed the barriers. By then other processes had been set in motion.

Also read: Palestine Is Witnessing the Daily Brutalities of an Occupying Power

In the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of east Jerusalem, the Israeli courts have recently declared the impending eviction of several Palestinian families from their homes to be legal. I know those families well. For many years Israeli human rights activists have accompanied their struggle to save their homes and their lives, and we have had some success in at least delaying the evictions, often for years. Parts of Sheikh Jarrah were once before the State of Israel came into being owned by Jews; Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war were settled there by the Jordanian government in the 1950s, and they have been living there ever since. But Israeli settlers from the extreme nationalist right have been trying to reclaim these lands for the Jews, and the courts have sadly, and cruelly, gone along with them. I wont go into the legal niceties here. Let me just note that easily a third of the properties in Israeli west Jerusalem belong to Palestinian families who lived there before 1948; under Israeli law, Palestinians have no hope of recovering their lost homes.

With the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, which affect some 300 people, about to happen unless the Supreme Court steps in to stop them, an unlikely move the protests in the neighbourhood came back to life. Young Palestinians, including some from Arab villages in the north of Israel, joined in. Wild-eyed Jewish settler thugs, who now have their own party in the Knesset since Netanyahu brought them back from the limbo to which they had been consigned by law in 1988, descended upon Sheikh Jarrah in order to terrorise the Palestinian residents. Night after night, the neighbourhood turned into a battle ground, the police often siding with and protecting the settlers, as I saw with my own eyes. As so often, the attempt to violently suppress peaceful protest has boomeranged. Sheikh Jarrah is now a rallying cry for Palestinians everywhere in Israel and the West Bank, also for the Arab world beyond Palestine.

The height of madness was reached in the Haram al-Sharif during the final days of Ramadan, when tens of thousands of worshippers come to the Al-Aqsa mosque. Some of them threw stones at the police, who responded with extraordinary brutality. Hundreds of Palestinians were wounded, along with some 20 policemen. The Al-Aqsa mosque, mentioned in the Quran, is sacred to over a billion Muslims. It takes truly unusual degrees of imbecility to send policemen throwing stun grenades and tear gas at worshippers inside the mosque during Ramadan. Moreover, since the very beginning of the conflict in the early 20th century, Palestinian Muslims have seen the Zionist enterprise as aimed, first and foremost, at destroying the Haram so the Jews could rebuild their temple there. For many Palestinians, the Israeli police have now, not for the first time, substantiated this false notion.

A Palestinian man runs for cover during an Israeli air strike near the ruins of a tower building which was destroyed in earlier strikes in Gaza City, May 13, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Suhaib Salem

There were other factors in play. Elections were supposed to take place in Palestine this spring; the Palestinian Authority cancelled them, fearing they would lose ground to Hamas. Its a reasonable fear; the PA has failed miserably to deliver anything of lasting value to the Palestinian national movement. Hamas, furious at President Abu Mazens decision, eagerly took over the role of defending Jerusalem, the Haram, Sheikh Jarrah and the West Bank, the latter languishing for the last 74 years under a regime of state terror and institutionalised theft of Palestinian land for Israeli settlement.

And there is one more far from negligible element. It cannot be by chance that this crisis developed, to the point of war, just as the Israeli opposition parties seemed to be close to establishing a government in the wake of the last Israeli elections. Netanyahu, who has driven the country through four indecisive elections in the last two years for the sole purpose of evading the criminal charges pending against him in court, was likely to lose power. The new government-that-almost-was is now on hold, possibly ruled out. The reader can draw her own conclusions about Netanyahus role in running this politically useful catastrophe.

All of this story has been told by others. For most Israelis, the causal chain is either invisible or forgotten, as the war unfolds. And Hamas has its own lethal actions to account for. But the core of the matter lies in the axioms I mentioned in the opening paragraph. It isnt possible to enslave forever a population of millions, to deny them all basic human rights, to steal their lands, to humiliate them in a thousand ways, to hurt them, even kill them, with impunity, to create a regime meant to ensure permanent supremacy of one population over another, and all this by the exercise of massive military force. In fact, forever is an overstatement. A tiny state like Israel can apparently get away with such a policy for some decades, using, actually mis-using, the memory of the Holocaust as its moral capital. Sooner or later, severe oppression rebounds against the perpetrator. In Israel, when that happens, the answer is always and inevitably to use more violence. Most of the country, and especially its elected leadership, suffers from a chronic learning disability.

Also read: Jerusalem Is Ablaze Again and Israels Growing Settler Movement Was the Trigger

During these dark days and nights, one can hear a host of Israeli generals speaking, ad nauseam, about deterrence, the alleged goal of this war, a goal they think can be achieved by inflicting vast destruction on Hamas in Gaza. It is, I think, fair to say that this fantasy of deterrence has never worked. Only a nation haunted by a fundamental sense of impotence could cultivate such a delusion, even turning it into the cornerstone of its worldview and the guiding compass of its policies toward others, including the intimate Palestinian other who shares this land with the Jews.

In the midst of so much mindless destruction, one searches desperately for some tattered scraps of hope. I used to think I would live to see the change that must happen here to see the elementary principle of equality for all, enshrined in Israels Declaration of Independence, begin to take root in Israeli minds; to see Israelis and Palestinians embrace the many ties that bind them. Im no longer so sure Ill get to see that day.

David Shulman is an Indologist and an authority on the languages of India. A Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is an activist in Taayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership.

Original post:

The Delusions Driving Israeli Thinking Have Been Exposed as Never Before - The Wire

"Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well." Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

My body is a complex of overlapping and intersecting histories, migrations, oppressions, and struggles.

My mother's Malaysian Indian ancestors worked in rubber plantations that supplied cheap rubber for the American automotive boom, fueling the rapid industrialization of cities like Detroit. Malaysian Indians were then displaced from the plantations to make room for mechanized and ecologically destructive palm oil cultivation. Generations later, my mother's community, whose labor physically and economically transformed the planet, are now described as "tragic orphans" forgotten by India and treated with oppressive contempt by Malaysia. Malaysian Indians are disproportionately sicker, less educated, poorer, incarcerated, more often stateless, and killed more frequently by the police. Cheap rubber and palm oil are still in most of the products we use, while the physical and psychological toll their production takes on Malaysia's tragic orphans continues unnoticed.

On my father's side, our Sri Lankan Tamil community has endured one of the longest civil wars in modern history, culminating in the indiscriminate massacre of tens of thousands of ethnic Tamil civilians. The island's civil war spurred a state of collective trauma. Sri Lanka, with a population comparable to metropolitan New York City, has one of the world's highest number of enforced disappearances. Sri Lanka is also adjacent to the world's busiest global shipping lane, prompting countries around the world to largely ignore state-sponsored war crimes and human rights atrocities. The erasure of the Tamil community's trauma is an essential feature of international trade.

War ruins adjacent to a cemetery in a Tamil-majority region of Sri Lanka (Credit: Kartik Amarnath)

To describe his intellectual purpose, Dr. Cornel West often paraphrases the philosopher Theodor Adorno: "the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak." Despite crossing borders, oceans, and generations, my family's suffering still struggles to be heard. When collective suffering goes unacknowledged, it doesn't disappearit transforms. My family suffers in silence from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Through illness, our bodies express the trauma that goes unspoken.

From histories of Indigenous dispossession to the racial segregation built into our cities through state-sponsored redlining, oppressions are imprinted into the bodies of the vulnerable in the form of disease. Many of society's prevalent diseases are predicated on unresolved legacies of injustice.

In the spirit of Dr. West, I hope to combine my knowledge and skills across urban, environmental, and medical fields to create interdisciplinary forms of health practice in which unseen suffering is allowed to speak. Health practice, from the lab bench to the field, must move beyond siloed, top-down, and piecemeal interventions and toward a justice-oriented ethic informed by and accountable to vulnerable communities.

Science does not exist in a vacuum; we choose where and how to deploy our resources. Our duty to treat symptoms has to extend toward addressing their underlying root causes in structural inequities and oppressive histories.

Anything less would suggest that we're complacent with suffering and tragedy.

Author Kartik Amarnath presenting on climate justice and New York City's heat vulnerability and energy shortfall projections at the City University of New York Graduate Center. (Credit: CUNY Climate Action Lab)

I came to the realization that we need a vision for justice-oriented health practices while working as the Energy Planner of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), an alliance of grassroots organizations serving the city's most environmentally burdened low-income communities of color.

We worked in communities such as the South Bronx, a neighborhood with multiple sources of pollution, high rates of child asthma, vulnerabilities to sea level rise and extreme heat, and home to the nation's poorest Congressional district. My role was to work with city and state governments to reduce health and economic burdens from polluting energy infrastructure concentrated in low-income communities of color. I stewarded renewable energy projects and policy proposals that addressed systemic injustices. However, despite how creative, transformative, or even feasible our proposals were, we constantly ran into political gridlock.

I will never forget one of the last times I spoke at a public meeting on energy efficiency hosted by New York State's energy regulators. These "public" meetings attracted the usual technocrats: utility companies, academics, developers, engineers, and bureaucrats. I pointed out that these meetings always prioritized dollars and cents but, for the most vulnerable New Yorkers absent from the room, this was about life and death.

I told them that in Brooklyn alone hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people faced the overlapping threats of gentrification, extreme heat, stormwater surge, and an energy shortfall. Lives were on the line.

As usual, those present wouldn't acknowledge human suffering. Energy bureaucrats refused to commit to any lifesaving measures if it complicated the bottom line of the very industry they are mandated to regulate.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn's looming threats became reality far sooner than I expected.

In 2019, facing an energy shortfall during one of the worst heat waves on record, Con Edison shut off power for a working-class community of color that, according to New York City government data, is also one of the most vulnerable to extreme heat. The utility company, in their calculation of dollars and cents over life and death, shut off power for the most vulnerable in order to preserve it for everyone else. The multibillion-dollar company claimed they weren't aware of the publicly available health data on heat vulnerabilitythough my colleagues and I had been telling them for years.

The Harlem River Yard Power Station. (Credit: Ben Schumin/flickr)

Many people think of the energy sector as benign, providing fuel to turn on lights and power appliances. However, switching on a light, and all that is required to make that simple act possible, has a dark side.

The American power gridthe largest machine on Earthrelies heavily on aging infrastructure and fossil fuels. Along the energy supply chain, vulnerable communities differentiated by race and class are disproportionately harmed. Electricity generation alone contributes to more than 50,000 excess deaths annually, while African Americans and low-income communities face the highest health risks from power plant pollution. More than two-thirds of African Americans in the U.S. live within 30 miles of coal plants or oil and gas refineries, which helps explain why they also have higher rates of lung disease despite lower rates of smoking.

Household energy bills are often costlier for low-income communities and communities of color who, due to the racist legacy of redlining, disproportionately live in inefficient housing. In the summer of 2020, five times as many African American households and eight times as many Latinx households experienced electricity shut-offs due to nonpayment compared to white households. This all played out while being told to stay indoors during a devastating global pandemic, economic recession, America's largest nationwide protests, and one of the hottest summers on record.

Author Kartik Amarnath with Sarah Martin, co-chair of the NYC-EJA member organization Morningside Heights/West Harlem Sanitation Coalition, at a protest commemorating the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy (Credit: Kartik Amarnath)

Being in meetings with energy decision-makers made me realize that their unwillingness to address legacies of harm was a morally indefensible choice. I came to understand today's health burdens as embodiments of injustice, where vulnerable communities would continue to get sick and die because of willful inaction.

I wanted skills to clinically intervene in this situation, where structural transformation was not happening fast enough. Now, as an aspiring clinician, I can't accept the notion of treating patients without interrogating the oppressions that led to their afflictions. Yet, just like the energy technocrats, health practitioners traditionally fail to acknowledge maladies as manifestations of injustice.

A robust understanding of inequity, injustice, oppression, and their relationship to disease should permeate every area of health practice. This is no small undertaking. It will require addressing questions that don't have clear answers. I hope to be part of a new cadre of health practitioners who commit to answering these questions.

The task is large but there are glimpses of inspiration.

Author Kartik Amarnath (far right) at a rally on the steps of New York City Hall (Credit: Annel Hernandez)

In December 2016, during one of my first days at NYC-EJA, I experienced a moment that would set the tone for my intellectual and professional journey. More than 200 organizations had gathered for a NY Renews rally to demand the state pass the most aspirational climate legislation in the country, aimed at dismantling intersecting environmental, health, and economic harms.

A representative from the local nurses' union rose to speak. Noise suddenly enveloped us.

It was a recording of an asthmatic child wheezing, interspersed with the child's cries for help. It was as if her voice were wet clay slowly pressed through the mesh of the speakers. The once raucous crowd went silent. When the recording stopped, the nurse told us that she was from the South Bronx, where racist urban planning concentrated some of the nation's dirtiest power plants. These sounds were her daily reality.

The sounds may have come from a single patient, but they captured how the energy industry's legacy of injustice was etched into the bodies of oppressed peoples. In just a few minutes and using fewer words, the nurse demonstrated how health practitioners can apply their training toward struggles for environmental justice.

It is by connecting the dots between medical symptoms and the injustices that shape our society that patients and populations can be fully seen, and we move from simply managing suffering to delivering a lasting cure. Only then will we truly fulfill our oaths as health practitioners.

This article is inspired by and dedicated to the late Tamil feminist physician Dr. Rajani Thiranagama and surviving members of the University Teachers for Human Rights Jaffna.

Kartik Amarnath, MS, is the Policy Specialist for PUSH Buffalo and a MD and MPH candidate currently on a leave at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. His writing on energy, environmental health, and climate justice has been published in The Guardian, Naked Capitalism, The Albany Times Union, and academic journals in law and medicine. He can be reached at kkamarnath91@gmail.com.

Read more from the original source:

Allow suffering to speak: Treating the oppressive roots of illness - Environmental Health News

(JTA) Gal Gadot might have decided for a while to steer clear of current events after drawing criticism for her rendition of John Lennons Imagine during the height of the COVID pandemic. But the Israeli movie star was so moved by the deepening conflict in her country that she posted a message to her 53 million Instagram followers on Wednesday.

My heart breaks, the Wonder Woman star, who served in the Israeli army, wrote Wednesday.

My country is at war, Gadot continued. I worry for my family, my friends. I worry for my people. This is a vicious cycle that has been going on for far too long. Israel deserves to live as a free and safe nation. Our neighbors deserve the same I pray for better days.

Gadot was one of countless celebrities to weigh in on the conflict, which has grown fierce over a matter of days and resulted so far in the deaths of six Israelis and over 50 Palestinians.

For the latest news on the conflict, follow our coverage here.

Many of the celebrities to weigh in are being highly critical of the Israeli governments actions. Heres what theyre saying and how theyre being received.

Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah devoted a Daily Show segment to the conflict. (Screenshot from YouTube)

The Daily Show host devoted nearly nine minutes of his popular Comedy Central show Tuesday night to discussing the nuances of the current conflict and the difficulties people have in talking about it.

If you start from Israel fired rockets into Gaza, well then Israel is the bad guy but then you take a step back in time and you go, Well Hamas fired rockets at Israel, then Hamas is the bad guy. But then you take a step back and you go, Well, the Israeli police, they went in and started beating people up in a mosque during Ramadan well then Israel is the bad guy. But then you go well the Palestinians, they were throwing rocks well the Israelis, they were kicking people out of their homes well the intifada well Israel keeps taking more and more land well the Arab invasion [could be referring to Yom Kippur War or 1948 War of Independence] and back and back and back, and who knows how far!

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman attends the premiere of Neons Vox Lux at ArcLight Hollywood, Dec. 5, 2018. (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

Portman has criticized Israels government in the past perhaps most notably in her refusal to accept the Genesis Prize, nicknamed the Jewish Nobel, in Jerusalem over her disapproval of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Tuesday, the Israeli-American star reposted a series of images to her Instagram stories amplified on the platform by fellow Oscar winner Viola Davis titled What To Know About Sheikh Jarrah, the contested neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem where Israeli courts have threatened to evict Palestinian families. Tensions over those pending evictions helped lead to the Jerusalem protests that set off the streak of violence, and #SaveSheikhJarrah has been trending on social media since the weekend.

Rihanna

Rihanna performs onstage during the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Aug. 28, 2016. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

The pop star called for an end to the violence, saying her heart is breaking in a rare show of solidarity for both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

Innocent Israeli and Palestinian children are hiding in bomb sheltersThere needs to be some kind of resolve! We are sadly watching innocent people fall victim to notions perpetuated by government and extremists, and this cycle needs to be broken! she wrote on Instagram to her over 95 million followers on Wednesday.

She got plenty of responses from all sides.

Gigi and Bella Hadid

Bella Hadid in 2018. (Georges Biard/Wikimedia Commons)

The supermodel sisters have a Palestinian father and previously have had harsh words for Israel on social media. Both have shared a series of posts and Instagram stories online since the weekend.

Gigi, the elder sister who has featured on over 30 international Vogue covers, wrote among other things on Instagram to her 66 million followers: One cannot advocate for racial equality, LGBT & womens rights, condemn corrupt & abusive regimes and other injustices yet choose to ignore the Palestinian oppression.

Bella, with over 41 million followers, among several Instagram posts included one with a series of images of two illustrated women talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the women asks, So arent Israelis and Palestinians just fighting over religion? The other woman responds: They are not fighting, Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed and the situation is about anything but religion.

The format has been mocked by some elsewhere on social media.

Malala

Malala Yousafzai: A Palestinian child should be sitting in a classroom, not in rubble. (Screenshot)

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Pakistani activist recorded a video message in which she expressed her solidarity with the Palestinians and called Israels actions a crime against humanity.

After decades of oppression against Palestinians, we cannot deny the asymmetry of power and the brutality from Israeli air strikes on women and children in Gaza, she said.

Lena Headey

Lena Headey in 2014. (Denny Harrison/Flickr)

Headey, the British actress best known for her role as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, has reposted multiple posts from an anti-Zionist writer on Instagram. One reads Save Sheikh Jarrah and Zionist Israeli Apartheid over an image of a boy holding a Palestinian flag.

Another note that Headey reposted reads: this is not a Jewish state but an apartheid Zionist regime this is a colonisation of ethnic cleansing upon an oppressed and imprisoned group of people.

Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

The movie star and known activist called for sanctions on Israel in a tweet: 1500 Palestinians face expulsion in #Jerusalem. 200 protesters have been injured. 9 children have been killed. Sanctions on South Africa helped free its black people its time for sanctions on Israel to free Palestinians. Join the call. #SheikhJarrah.

Roger Waters

Roger Waters in a video message he uploaded to social media. (Screenshot)

The former Pink Floyd frontman is a longtime anti-Israel activist and one of the more prominent public supporters of a cultural boycott of Israel. He posted a video message on Twitter calling for an end to the Sheikh Jarrah saga, or what he calls the genocidal removal of people from their homes. He also criticizes President Joe Biden for staying silent on the issue and says he is starting a new campaign to get FIFA to stop allowing international soccer matches against Israel.

Dua Lipa

Dua Lipa in 2021. (Warner Music New Zealand/Wikimedia Commons)

The Grammy-winning British pop star she is dating the Hadids younger brother, Anwar also put several posts on her Instagram with the #SaveSheikhJarrah hashtag, according to Newsweek. In her Instagram stories she put a tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders calling on the United States to speak out strongly against the violence by government-allied Israeli extremists in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Halsey

Halsey at the 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards in Los Angeles. (Glenn Francis/Wikimedia Commons)

The pop singer known for hits like Without Me, which has well over a billion Spotify streams, tweeted a note that ends with #FreePalestine and argues that religion and geopolitics are not at the heart of the conflict: It is not too complicated to understand that brown children are being murdered + people are being displaced under the occupation of one of the most powerful armies in the world. It is willful ignorance to conflate these simple horrors with religion + geopolitics.

Veena Malik

Veena Malik in 2019 (Wikimedia Commons)

Malik is an actress and comedian who has starred in over a dozen Pakistani and Bollywood films. On Tuesday, she posted a series of tweets that seemed to rejoice in the violence against Israel including one that quoted Hitler as saying: I would have killed all the Jews of the world but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.

She also tweeted #IronDome is doomed with a laughing emoji, referencing Israels missile defense system, which has been overwhelmed by rockets fired from Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The tweets had been taken down as of Wednesday.

RELATED: The fighting in Gaza, Jerusalem and across Israel, explained

Read this article:

From Gal Gadot to Trevor Noah, here's what celebrities are saying about the Israel-Gaza violence - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

The Chinese Communist Party and its leader want to stay in power for a very long time. The party is celebrating its centennial anniversary this year under the slogan Follow the Party Forever. And Xi Jinping plans to be dictator for life. This is unhappy news for the Chinese people and for the world. Dictatorships are oppressive and inefficient at home, and aggressive abroad. And personal dictatorships are particularly bad.

All Communist parties have ruled as dictatorships. They initially excused it as a temporary necessity because they came to power through national convulsions: In Soviet Russia, China, and Vietnam through civil war, in Eastern Europe through the Soviet occupation after World War II, and in Cuba through a military coup.

But they never evolved towards democracy. No ruling Communist party has ever tolerated competing political parties, free elections, an independent judiciary, a free media, or non-political military and police. Dissidents lose their jobs, are imprisoned, and often killedsometimes in large-scale terror campaigns.

At the pinnacle of these dictatorships sits the head of the Communist party who is always the object of a leader cult. Once he takes power, he usually keeps it for decades, never leaves willingly, and is very rarely toppled.

The Soviet Unions Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko died in office. Same for Chinas Mao, Vietnams Ho Chi Minh, Romanias Ceausescu, and North Koreas Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Bulgarias Zhivkov and East Germanys Honecker were only ousted when Communism fell in 1989.

Their countrys economic life is in the tight grip of the Communist rulers as well. Private enterprise is either forbidden or, as in China, centrally controlled. Chinas people are ill-served by this. Communism interferes with free markets and has always produced significantly less prosperity than Capitalism.

At times, gravely misguided economic policies resulted in mass starvation. Millions died during Stalins brutal collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s and during Kim Jong-ils botched economic reforms in the 1990s. Also, tens of millions died during Maos Great Leap Froward in the late 1950s.

Mao ruled in this tradition for thirty years and the effects were disastrous. When he died in 1976, China was impoverished, backward, and closed to the world.

The following thirty years were marked by Deng Xiaopings dramatic reforms. He introduced Capitalism in parts of the Chinese economy and opened the country to the world. Importantly, he instituted collective leadership at the top of the Communist Party and term limits for its senior leaders. China flourished. And there was hope that China will become a democracy and a responsible participant in international relations.

Xi Jinping has been reversing Deng Xiaopings reforms ever since he took power in 2012. He did away with term limits and collective leadership and brought back the leader cult. He is restricting free-market capitalism in China and increasing the role of the Communist party in economic enterprises. And Chinas dealings with other countries are increasingly confrontational.

Xi Jinpings personal dictatorship is suffering from the same ills that have plagued dictatorships everywhere and at all times.

The first and most consequential casualties of any dictatorship are truth and freedom of expression. Dictators reject any challenges to their flawed doctrines and punish dissenters. The resulting uniformity of thought makes it harder to solve the challenges of the day and chart the best course for tomorrow. Even worse, people in a dictatorship have to fake enthusiasm for the party line, which leads to cynicism towards truth throughout society.

In this environment, a servile bureaucracy and media report embellished good news and hides the bad news. Dictators end up with bad data for their decisionmaking.

There are no institutional breaks in a dictatorship. Through fear, dictators have absolute control over the government, legislature, repression apparatus, judiciary, and media. Their bad decisions cannot be discussed, appealed, or stopped.

Entrepreneurship and innovation, the key drivers of economic growth, wilt in such an environment. Job creators need freedom of thought and action, predictable laws, and an independent judiciary.

All dictators view the outside world with suspicion. They resent foreign support for democracy in their country and bristle at foreign condemnations of their oppression. They also tend to create conflicts abroad to whip up nationalist support at home.

Past dictatorships did not lead to stability, prosperity, and peace in the long run. Neither will Xi Jinpings Communist dictatorship. It will slow China down, increase social conflict, and lead to international tensions.

Dan Negrea is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He served in leadership positions at the State Department and was a Wall Street executive. He defected from Communist Romania.

Image: Reuters

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The Damaging Dictatorship of Xi Jinping - The National Interest