#Illegal Regime of Terrorist and Apartheid Isra-hell

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People have the first Fast-Breaking Dinner (Iftar) of the Muslim Holy Month of Ramadan among the rubbles of destroyed buildings in Rafah on May 11, 2024 amid ongoing “Terrorist, War Criminal, Fascist, Apartheid and Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐗 Isra-hell’s” attacks on “Forever Palestine’s Gaza.”

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A new poll has found that a majority of voters in the UK support a ban on British arms sales to “Terrorist, Fascist, Genocidal, Apartheid, War Criminal Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐗, Isra-hell,” while a similar majority believe that “Terrorist, Fascist, Genocidal, Apartheid, War Criminal Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐗 Isra-hell’s” actions in Gaza are violating human rights.

The poll, commissioned by Action for Humanity and conducted by YouGov, found that 56 percent of UK voters are in favour of banning the export of arms to Israel, while only 17 percent are against such a ban.

59 percent of voters also believe “Terrorist, Fascist, Genocidal, Apartheid, War Criminal Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐗 Isra-hell” is violating human rights in Gaza.

Among voters who plan to vote for the Labour Party, 71 percent back a ban on arms exports to Israel. For Conservative Party voters, that number is 38 percent - this is still larger than the number of Conservative voters who want to keep exporting arms to Israel, which was 36 percent.

On Wednesday, more than 600 prominent lawyers, academics and former judges signed a letter warning the UK government that its continued arming of Israel is breaching international law.

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A Palestinian Family Breaks Iftar at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound in Occupied East Jerusalem, Forever Palestine 🇵🇸, During the Holy Month of Ramadan, Where the “Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Genocidal Isra-helli” Offensive on Palestine's Gaza has Silenced all the Festivities of the Holy Month, Leaving Only Space for Worship and Prayer.

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“War On Gaza: The Illegal Regime of Apartheid and Terrorist Isra-hell's Food-Queue Slaughter Cannot Go Unpunished”

Autocratic governments around the world will be emboldened if Israel escapes punishment for killing over 100 desperate, starving people as they waited for aid in Gaza

— Othman Moqbel | 5 March 2024 | Middle East Eye

People mourn following an early morning incident when residents rushed toward aid trucks in Gaza City on 29 February, 2024 (AFP)

If hungry people in Ukraine had been shot at and killed while queuing for food, the West would have rightly called it a war crime.

Likewise, if troops opened fire in Syria, the US and UK would rightly condemn it as another atrocity committed in this context.

However, when people are queuing for food in Gaza - where the UN has warned of the worst famine it has ever recorded - the US instead noted it would "complicate peace talks".

Early on 29 March, starving Palestinians were queueing for long-awaited deliveries of food in Gaza City’s al-Rasheed Street when Israeli forces opened fire on them. According to Gaza health officials, a minimum of 112 people were killed and 280 injured, the majority of whom appear to have been shot.

Fares Afana, head of the ambulance service at Gaza's Kamal Adwan Hospital, said medics found “dozens or hundreds” of bodies lying on the ground once they reached the scene. He said some wounded had to be carried to hospitals on donkey carts as there were not enough ambulances to take all the dead and wounded.

There are counterclaims that only a small group were fired upon and the majority were killed in the crush from the resulting panic - caused by the shooting. Either way, people would not have died if desperately hungry people had not been fired upon while queuing for food.

Inhumanity At Its Worst

This is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

There is not one single document that sets out international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL), but a series of internationally recognised treaties, customs, conventions and standards.

In every iteration of these, it is made unequivocally clear that people in conflict must be allowed to receive aid, aid distributions must not be targeted by military action and civilians must not be targeted by military action.

The West cannot morally continue to shy away from highlighting violations of the rights of people impacted by conflict, whether it is in Ukraine, Syria, or, as it was on Thursday, in Gaza.

Another violation of IHL and IHRL is when a military actor stops a population from receiving the basic human right of food, causing widespread hunger and starvation.

This is another accusation that has been made during the ongoing assault on Gaza, not least by the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. Is it not even more cruel and heartbreaking that people in Gaza, driven to record levels of hunger so they queue en masse for any food aid so as not to die of starvation, are shot at and killed while queuing?

As someone who for decades has been working in humanitarian emergencies and conflicts, while at the same time witnessing inhumanity at its worst, I am not sure I have seen a more horrendous atrocity committed in my lifetime.

There is no way to look at Thursday’s events without calling it what it is - a war crime and a crime against humanity. And the simple reason it is not being called what it is, is political. However, there is nothing political about the killing of innocent civilians.

A wounded man rests on a mattress on the floor of al-Shifa Hospital following the Israeli attack on Gazans waiting for aid (Mohammed al-Hajjar/MEE)

Rafah Incursion

The US secretary of defence himself has confirmed that over 25,000 women and children have been killed thus far in Palestine, in just five months.

On 10 March, many people around the globe will celebrate Mother’s Day - yet in Gaza, so many children have lost their mothers and so many mothers have lost their children due to this brutal conflict.

Another milestone is the start of the holy month of Ramadan, a time when the majority of Gazans will fast, pray and take part in spiritual reflection, self-improvement and devotion.

However, Benny Gantz, an Israeli war cabinet member, has warned that Rafah could face a ground incursion at the start of Ramadan, which the entire world - including Israel's partners in Washington - have warned against due to the likelihood of widespread civilian casualties.

If this comes to pass, the horrors of Thursday will be repeated again and again. One of the most densely populated areas of the world will become a theatre of war, which will mean more civilian deaths and life-destroying injuries.

If firing upon starving people queuing for food goes unchallenged and unpunished by the international community, what incentive is there for military actors to spare civilian lives in a ground assault on Rafah?

Why are governments around the world still supplying the arms to Israel to carry out these suspected atrocities instead of giving money to aid human life in Gaza?

For those of us observing Ramadan this year, and those of us who are not, we must support the people of Gaza all we can and we must pray for an end to the atrocities committed against them.

We must also pray that parties who have committed violations of international humanitarian and human rights law will be brought to account.

If they are not, what is to stop military actors from abusing civilian populations like this in all future conflicts across the world?

These injustices need addressing - not just for the people of Gaza, but for all humanity.

— Othman Moqbel is a British-Palestinian Non-profit Executive. He is currently CEO of Action For Humanity, the parent charity of Syria Relief, the largest Syria-focused NGO in the UK. He was formerly a trustee of ACEVO, Charity Futures. and was CEO of Human Appeal from 2010 to 2017. In 2015 he won ACEVO fellowship award as one of best CEO and In 2017, Othman Moqbel was nominated for the BOND Humanitarian Award.

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The Lawyers Behind the Case are Representing Two Palestinian Families From Gaza Who Says that German Officials Including Chancellor Olaf Scholz are “Aiding and Abetting” Illegal and Apartheid Regime of the Terrorist Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 Isra-hell’s Genocide in Gaza. The Court Case Follows South Africa’s 🇿🇦 Historic ICJ Case Against Illegal and Apartheid Regime of the Terrorist Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 Isra-hell in January 2024, which Ruled that “The Bastard Child of the US 🇺🇸, UK 🇬🇧, Germany 🇩🇪, France 🇫🇷, Italy 🇮🇹, Australia and the West 🇪🇺” Must Take Action to Prevent Acts of GENOCIDE in Gaza, Forever Palestine 🇵🇸!

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Students St Two Universities Strongly Associated With Lord Arthur Balfour Have Launched Pro-Palestinian Encampments On Campus To Protest “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Illegally Occupier of Palestine and The Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell’s War On Gaza.”

The protests at Edinburgh and Cambridge are part of a growing movement on campuses across the world, which involves students setting up protest camps to demand that their institutions break off ties with Israeli institutions, as well as companies involved in supplying arms to the state.

At Edinburgh, students wearing Palestinian scarves made their demands clear at the start of their protest at the university's Old College .

In one video taken on Monday and provided to Middle East Eye by activists, a student with a loudspeaker is seen addressing fellow protesters.

"We demand that the University of Edinburgh divest entirely from companies tied to Israel and complicit in the globally acknowledged genocide of the Palestinian people," the speaker says.

Middle East Eye has asked both universities for comment, while Edinburgh Univeristy has not yet responded, a spokesperson for the University of Cambridge said: "The University is fully committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law and we acknowledge the right to protest.

"We will not tolerate antisemitism, Islamophobia and any other form of racial or religious hatred, or other unlawful activity."

Balfour is infamous in the Middle East and beyond for his eponymous declaration, which paved the way for the Zionist settlement of historic Palestine and the eventual expulsion of its native Arab people.

He also served as British prime minister and was foreign secretary when he issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising Jews a homeland in Palestine.

The decision paved the way for the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine under the British Mandate, culminating in the Nakba of 1948, which saw the establishment of the Israeli state and expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.

Many of those expelled found refuge in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, where their descendants remain today.

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Illegal Isra-hell Has The Same Western Support As Hitler – Maduro

The President of Venezuela 🇻🇪 Backed the Assessment of the Gaza Conflict Made by his Brazilian 🇧🇷 Counterpart Lula da Silva

President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro Moros. © Getty Images/Carlos Becerra

Modern Israel enjoys “The Same Encouragement, The Same Funding, and The Same Support” of the collective West like Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany before the World War II, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said.

The president made the remarks on his own TV program With Maduro Plus, backing the assessment of the situation in the Middle East provided recently by his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva.

“Powerful family names in the US, Europe and London supported and celebrated Hitler’s arrival to power in 1933. They encouraged him and allowed him to persecute my Jewish ancestors,” Maduro stated. The president made public his Jewish ancestry back in early 2010s, revealing his grandparents were Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism.

The Western elites “kept quiet because they were preparing Hitler for him to launch his military power against the Soviet Union,” Maduro explained, stressing that, ultimately, Hitler was “a construct, a monster” created by the collective West.

Modern Israel has turned into the very same thing, the president asserted, urging Jewish people who are still true to their roots to end the ongoing “Massacre” of the Palestinians.

“The criminal military apparatus of the Illegal Regime of Isra-hell also has the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support” of the West, Maduro stressed. “As President Lula da Silva said, the Israeli government is doing the same thing [to the Palestinians] that Hitler did to the Jewish people.”

Brazil’s da Silva delivered the explosive remarks over the weekend, describing Terrorist Occupier Illegal Isra-hell’s Military action against Hamas militants in Gaza as “Genocide” and “Slaughter.”

“What is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people did not exist at any other historical moment. In fact, it did exist: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” he stated.

The remarks got an extremely poor reception in Israel, with multiple top officials expressing their outrage over his Holocaust comments. Israeli PM Benjamin Satan-Yahu slammed the Brazilian president’s words as “Shameful and Serious,” warning they were “Crossing a Red Line.”

Ultimately, the Brazilian President was Declared Persona Non-Grata in Israel altogether, with the country’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz warning West Jerusalem “Will Not Forget Nor Forgive” the alleged “Serious Anti-Semitic Attack” by Lula, urging the leader to take his words back. Brasilia, however, has apparently rebuked the criticism, with Lula’s Chief Adviser Celso Amorim Describing the Move of Declaring the President Persona Non Grata as “Absurd.”

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British Artist Bins 🗑️ Award Over Government’s Backing of the “Illegal Regime of The Terrorist, Genocidal, Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 Cunts and Apartheid Isra-hell”

Katharine Hamnett Received the Official Distinction in 2010 for her Eye-catching Anti-establishment Designs

— RT | February 20, 2024

Katharine Hamnett in one of her own designs at the People's March for Europe, 2017. © Getty Images/Wiktor Szymanowicz

British artist Katharine Hamnett publicly renounced her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) honor as a statement against the government’s ongoing support for Israel’s war in Gaza, in a video posted to social media on Monday.

Wearing a t-shirt reading “Disgusted to Be British” in her trademark all-caps font, the designer said “I’m Disgusted to be British For Our Role in Genocide in Gaza,” brandishing her CBE and placing it in a trash can.

The honor “Belongs in the Dustbin 🗑️ Along with [UK Prime Minister Rishi] Sunak and [Labour Party leader Keir] Starmer,” Hamnett explained, encouraging viewers to visit a website where they could look up their MP. “Tell Them You’ll Never Vote For Them Again Unless They Support a Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza,” she said.

Viewers were also given a link where they could buy a shirt similar to the one Hamnett was wearing.

The British designer launched her eponymous label in 1979 and soon got attention for her protest t-shirts, which bore simple slogans across the chest in all-caps font. Early anti-war designs included “Choose Life,” “Education Not Missiles,” and “Worldwide Nuclear Ban Now,” along with more general slogans like “Leaders Suck.”

In the 1980s, she found wider attention, with celebrities like pop acts Madonna, WHAM!, Queen, and George Michael wearing her designs in music videos and performances. Supermodels including Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Nadja Auermann walked in her runway shows early in their careers.

Hamnett has continued to produce political t-shirts ever since, protesting the UK’s involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with slogans like “No War, Blair Out” and “Not in My Name,” and became an early voice for the responsible sourcing of textiles, lobbying for a tightening of industry standards as far back as 1989.

She was awarded the CBE in 2010, a development that she said “Surprised” her. “It’s Quite Funny, I’m Respectable at Last,” she told the BBC at the time, calling the distinction “seductive.”

Thousands of British Artists Signed an Open Letter in October Calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza. While that letter was published when the Palestinian death toll hovered around 2,750, the number of dead is now more than ten times that, with Gaza’s health ministry estimating the current figure at upwards of 29,000 as of Monday. Israel declared war in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 raid, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and another 240 taken captive.

The UK has been second only to the US in its unflinching support for Illegal, Apartheid Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 Cunts, Genocidal and Terrorist Isra-hell throughout the war, even as allies have demanded restraint. London has also collaborated with the US military to bomb Yemen in response to Houthi attacks on Israel-affiliated ships in the Red Sea.

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Graffiti Artists in Egypt have adorned the streets of the Al Matareya district of Cairo with artwork showing their solidarity with the people of Palestine, as “Illegal Regime of Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Genocidal and the Bastard Child of the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and the European Union: Isra-hell” continues its genocidal war on besieged Gaza. The graffiti contained praise for the people of Palestine and their resilience in the face of Israeli atrocities.

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“On War Criminal, Terrorist Apartheid and Illegal Regime of Isra-hell,” Trump Is Even Worse Than ‘Genocidal Joe’ Biden

Donald Trump and his MAGA Cult of Christian Nationalists Would Never Force Isra-hell to Accept a Ceasefire — or a Palestinian State

— James Risen | March 4 2024 | The Intercept

Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives during a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Greensboro, N.C., on March 2, 2024. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To Understand The State of American Politics today when it comes to Gaza, Israel, and Palestine, just look at the very different ways in which the House of Representatives handled the cases of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, and Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican.

Tlaib was punished for her views on Israel and the war in Gaza. Mast was not.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

Tlaib, the Only Palestinian American in Congress, was censured by the Republican-controlled House in November after she posted a video of protesters in Michigan chanting “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” Israel’s supporters claim the chant is code for a desire to wipe the Jewish state off the map, but Tlaib responded that it was just “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”

“I Can’t Believe I Have To Say This,” she added, “But Palestinian People Are Not Disposable.”

Tlaib’s censure was a symbolic act that has no substantive impact on her ability to function in Congress, but that wasn’t the point. House Republicans just wanted to embarrass her and politically marginalize any congressional support for the Palestinian people. House Democrats briefly sought to censure Mast for comparing Palestinians to the hundreds of thousands of German civilians carpet bombed into oblivion by the Allies in Nazi Germany during World War II. His implication was that Palestinians deserve to be obliterated for the crimes of Hamas, just as German civilians were annihilated for the crimes of Hitler and the Third Reich. “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians,” he said. “I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”

The motion to censure Mast was introduced in the House last November, at the same time the Republicans were going after Tlaib. But while the censure motion against Tlaib succeeded, the motion against Mast was quietly withdrawn.

Ever since, Mast has doubled down on his anti-Palestinian rhetoric without facing any consequences. He even wore an Israeli military uniform to a Republican conference meeting on Capitol Hill. When questioned about it by reporters, he said that since Tlaib displays a Palestinian flag outside her office, he thought he should wear his old Israel Defense Forces uniform. A U.S. Army veteran who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2010, Mast briefly volunteered with the IDF in January 2015, performing support functions like packing medical kits. Virtually every other Republican in Congress shares Mast’s views and would gladly don an IDF uniform if they had one.

Earlier this year, Mast expanded on his comments about Palestinian civilians, saying that even Palestinian babies are not innocent and are thus legitimate targets. “It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters,” he told Code Pink protesters. When asked about images of Palestinian infants being killed in Israeli attacks, he said “these are not innocent Palestinian civilians.”

“From The River To The Sea, Palestine 🇵🇸 Will Be Free.”

The Contrasting Outcomes of the Tlaib and Mast cases highlight an undeniable fact: The American political establishment still strongly favors Israel over the Palestinians. But if Donald Trump gets back into the Oval Office, he and his MAGA Republicans like Brian Mast will be even worse.

Trump is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims. During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was “freaking evil,” but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of “our great fighters.” Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.

After the October 7 Hamas attack, Trump was briefly critical of Netanyahu and blurted out that Hezbollah was “very smart.” Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has battled Israel on its northern border with Lebanon. Trump was immediately and roundly attacked by other Republicans for his comments, and he quickly renewed his long-standing pledge to align the United States fully with Israel. If he’s reelected, he will give Israel unalloyed support for all-out war, and he will do so with the wholehearted backing of the Republican Party.

Republicans’ support for Israel is matched or exceeded by their hatred for Palestinians. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who was secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, has proposed legislation that would prevent Palestinians from entering the United States and trigger the mass deportation of those already here. It would ban those holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority from obtaining U.S. visas, while mandating the removal of Palestinian passport holders already living here.

Many Republicans express their unwavering support for Israel in biblical and apocalyptic terms. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Christian evangelical, made his first public appearance after being elected House speaker last October at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he said that “God is not done with Israel.”

It is dangerous to get between evangelicals and their theology. Trump recognizes their importance to his political success, and his support for Israel is a way to satisfy his evangelical Christian base. “No president has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump claimed in 2022. “Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”

At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump pushed through a provision in the party platform ending GOP support for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state. Now, Trump and Republicans agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel can no longer agree to a two-state solution. “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu said in January. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do? This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel.”

That’s fine with Trump and Republicans like Brian Mast.

Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. What’s more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White House’s approach to Israel. Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire; such new pressure from the Biden administration appears to be working, as Israel and Hamas now seem closer to an agreement.

Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a ceasefire — or a Palestinian state. Mast has harshly attacked Biden for continuing to support a two-state solution, dismissing the idea by saying that “a Palestinian state would be run by terrorists.”

There are limits to Biden’s support for Netanyahu. Trump and the Republican Party have none.

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Why Are America’s Elite Universities So Afraid Of This Scholar’s Paper?

The Columbia Law Review Website Was Temporarily Shut Down After It Published a Palestinian Human Rights Lawyer’s Article Proposing a New Way to Understand Palestinian Life Under “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Zionist Isra-helli 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Rule”

— Jonathan Guyer | Sunday 9 June 2024

The Palestinian Human Rights Lawyer Rabea Eghbariah. Photograph: Courtesy Rabea Eghbariah

When the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah arrived at a Manhattan cafe on Thursday afternoon, he had just learned that his article had been reinstated in the Columbia Law Review. After a weeklong censorship controversy, the prestigious journal’s website was back online, too.

The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicize Eghbariah’s 105-page article, titled Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept. In it, he proposed a new framework to explain the complex, fragmented legal regimes governing Palestinians. He wanted to bring the word Nakba – which translates from the Arabic as catastrophe, and is better known for describing the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 – to the center of a new legal conversation.

Wearing a white T-shirt and linen pants and sipping iced coffee, he reflected on an extraordinary week that saw his legal theories – ordinarily the stuff of arcane law school debates – ignite emotive conversations about the legitimate bounds of debate about Israel and Palestine.

What’s more, it wasn’t the first time his ideas were deemed too dangerous to publish by the Ivy League.

He had worked on his contribution for almost half a year, finding a home for it at the Columbia Law Review after a shorter web piece he had written for the Harvard Law Review had been blocked at the last minute.

He was proud of his scholarship but found it dangerous that the content of his article had become secondary to what he saw as the manufactured controversy of its censorship. “Now, we have to debate about my right to say what I want to say instead of debating about what I actually said,” he told the Guardian.

“I felt convinced by my work if it’s generating this repression,” he said. Ultimately, the story led to headlines in major newspapers, and a PDF of the article was posted widely on social media, getting far more readers than is typical for legal scholarship. “People can see through these authoritarian tactics and reject them. The censorship in this case is actually counterproductive.”

When Eghbariah woke up on Monday morning, his article was online. “It was supposed to be a very exciting moment,” he recalled.

But soon, the journal’s website was inaccessible – “under maintenance”, it said. It turned out the law review board had taken it down. “It was very alarming that they would go to that extent,” he said.

“What Is So Scary About Palestinians Having The Right To Narrate Their Own Realities?” — Rabea Eghbariah

Eghbariah, a Harvard Law School doctoral candidate, had been splitting his time between Massachusetts and Haifa, Israel, when he formulated the ideas driving his scholarship. He was working for the legal organization Adalah, where he has represented Palestinian clients in the Israeli judicial system – some in Gaza, others in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, still others citizens of Israel. He has worked on a landmark case about Israel’s cyber unit, which works with social media platforms to censor speech, and fought to reunite families separated by these different legal regimes. He realized that each time he and colleagues brought a case forward, they had to figure out which legal framework applied.

It is variegated, by design. “You have an invisible map in your head where you know what laws to invoke depending on the case,” Eghbariah said, “and this is not intuitive at all.”

Different legal systems apply to Palestinians living under Israeli rule or in neighboring Arab states or elsewhere. “It’s kind of a system of domination by fragmentation,” he explained. “We become trained in doing these legal gymnastics, and flipping from one framework to the other, without sometimes even reflecting about the nature of this.”

To articulate that fragmentation in his legal research, he realized he needed a new terminology. Just as the genocide convention emerged after the Holocaust, and the word apartheid entered everyday speech amid South Africa’s systemized segregation, Eghbariah was finding that analogies to other seemingly comparable situations were insufficient. In the article, he argues that the term Nakba, in use by Palestinians for decades, encapsulates the layered and overlapping legal entanglements of Palestinian life in the absence of self-determination.

The Nakba of 1948, he says, is not a historical artefact. His grandparents survived the Nakba and it informs Eghbariah’s research. Like many Palestinian scholars, he views Israel’s war on Gaza as part of a continuing Nakba to destroy Palestinian life on the land Israel seeks to control. “It’s an organic framework that has been developed in Palestine to reference the ramifications and ongoing nature of the Nakba of 1948,” Eghbariah said. “What the genocide moment and discourse did to that is that it actually made me think about it in legal terms.”

The article lays out the concept, and as he develops the idea further in his dissertation, he hopes it could have practical ramifications for outstanding disputes over matters like Palestinian property rights and the status of refugees. This is how laws in the US have often developed: scholars put out a new approach in a law review, practitioners try it out, and it can lead to case law or legislative efforts. “Those ideas get refined in the process,” Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Guardian. “It’s provocative, and it’s exactly what scholarship should be doing. It’s exactly what Palestinian scholars need to be doing.”

The campus of Harvard Law School. The Harvard Law Review blocked publication of an early version of the article. Photograph: Chitose Suzuki/AP

After Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel and amid Israel’s military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the student editors at the Columbia Law Review contacted Eghbariah. No Palestinian author had previously contributed to the journal.

His draft went through “at least” five edits, he says, with extensive feedback from about a dozen editors at the student-run journal, as he added 427 footnotes to the piece. But in early June, on the eve of the article’s publication, the publication’s alumni and faculty board urged the student editors to postpone Eghbariah’s piece or pull it from the journal entirely.

Student editors told the Intercept that the article had been extensively vetted according to procedure. Some, however, “expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published”, the Associated Press reported. The students went ahead with publication against the board’s wishes. The board said in a statement published when it restored the website that it had “received multiple credible reports that a secretive process was used to edit” the article, and that was its reasoning for taking the journal offline.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at the university, wrote that “nuking the website is a drastic, extraordinary step that requires much more justification than has been supplied by the directors thus far”.

The board never spelled out why it pulled the piece, beyond what it called an opaque editorial process – a description the student editors disputed. But for non-scholarly audiences, Eghbariah’s word choice may have seemed inflammatory. In the piece, he defines Zionism as inextricable from the Nakba and builds on the legal scholarship of apartheid and genocide. Its table of contents was itself arguably provocative, with the header “Zionism as Nakba”.

It echoed another episode from November, when the Harvard Law Review blocked publication of an earlier version of the article that it had commissioned from Eghbariah, after the law review president reportedly expressed safety concerns tied to the piece. That version of the piece later appeared in the Nation magazine.

“What is so scary about Palestinians having the right to narrate their own realities?” Eghbariah said. Student-run law review journals rarely if ever hear from their outside boards. “It’s unprecedented to even interfere in editorial processes,” he said. There have been no substantive or factual contestations of the claims of the Columbia Law Review article.

One of Eghbariah’s advisers at Harvard Law School is the prominent academic Noah Feldman, author of the new book To Be a Jew Today. He has called Eghbariah “one of the most brilliant students I’ve taught in 20 years as a law professor”. He declined to provide comment on the law review article, but said he “certainly” stood by his assessment of Eghbariah’s talents.

Eghbariah hopes the fracas around his article could bring more attention to the violence against Palestinians and what he describes as a genocidal campaign.

“There is a continuum between the material reality in Gaza and shutting down these debates,” he said. “They’re not separate issues.”

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Sheikh Zayed Towers, Which Were Destroyed By The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-helli Attacks in Gaza City, seen on June 4, 2024. Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images

A Federal Judge Visited “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” On A Junket Designed To Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing A Gaza Case.

Activists Suing The Biden Administration Over Gaza Policy Are Demanding The Judge Recuse Himself Over The Sponsored Trip.

— Shawn Musgrave | June 5 2024

Plaintiffs Suing The Biden Administration Over Gaza Policy have asked a federal appellate judge to recuse himself because of a trip he took to Israel in March. The World Jewish Congress, which sponsored the junket for 14 federal judges, framed the delegation as part of Israel’s “fight in the international court of public opinion.”

In an emergency motion filed Tuesday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued they were “ethically compelled” to ask Judge Ryan Nelson of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to recuse himself because the WJC trip was “explicitly designed to influence U.S. judicial opinion regarding the legality of ongoing Israeli military action against Palestinians.”

The plaintiffs are a mix of Palestinian human rights organizations and individual Palestinians, including Dr. Omar Al-Najjar, who has written about his experiences working in the decimated health infrastructure in Gaza. In November, they filed a complaint in federal court against President Joe Biden and other top officials, seeking “an injunction requiring the United States to fulfill its international law duty to prevent and cease being complicit — through unconditional financial and diplomatic support — in the unfolding genocide in Gaza.”

The district court dismissed the case in late January but urged the administration “to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.” The plaintiffs appealed to the 9th Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral arguments next week. Nelson’s selection for the three-judge argument panel was announced on Monday.

In March, Nelson joined 13 colleagues from the federal bench on the WJC-sponsored trip. Like Nelson, many of the judges on the trip were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

According to a disclosure about the trip, the judges met with high-ranking members of the Israel Defense Forces about “Operation Swords of Iron” — what Israel calls its current military operation in Gaza — and the application of international humanitarian law during war. The trip also included sessions with one of the attorneys defending Israel before the International Court of Justice, Tal Becker; former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin; and members of Israel’s Supreme Court and Knesset, the disclosure shows.

The judges met with a high-ranking official at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, to get the “American perspective,” one judge told the Jerusalem Post. State Department Secretary Antony Blinken is one of the defendants in the case before the 9th Circuit.

In a LinkedIn post summarizing lessons from the trip, Judge Matthew Solomson of the Federal Court of Claims, who helped organized the delegation, wrote, “Israel’s military culture is very attuned to international law; commanders consult lawyers at every step and the lawyers have veto power. We watched many video clips of Israeli military lawyers stopping strikes based on proportionality and collateral damage assessments. Their enemy doesn’t play by such rules.”

In late March, Nelson and Solomson spoke about the trip at a lunch talk hosted by Harvard Law School’s chapters of the Federalist Society and the Jewish Law Students Association. Their remarks were not made public, but Solomson wrote in a LinkedIn post that Nelson “expressed his inspiring faith in God and, concomitantly, an optimistic view of the future.”

Kath Hochul’s Trip of “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” Bankrolled By Group Funding Illegal Settlements! New York Disgusting Governor Kathy Hochul Visits “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” on October 19, 2023. Photo: Shlomi Amsalem/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul

UJA-Federation of New York, A Tax-Exempt Nonprofit, Has Sent More Than Half a Million Dollars to Groups Supporting “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-helli” Settlements.

“The UJA Has Helped Destroy Any Semblance of a ‘Peace Process’ or Possibility of a Two State Solution.”

In their recusal motion, the plaintiffs highlight coverage of the trip in the Israeli press, particularly by the English-language ILTV. “This invaluable experience allowed them to delve deeper into the legality of Israel’s conduct in the operation,” ILTV said of the trip in an Instagram post.

“At this time, when Israel is facing so much in the court of public opinion and in the courts around the world,” WJC’s chief marketing officer, Sara Friedman, told ILTV in March, “it’s so important for people who understand the judicial system, who understand the laws of war, to come here.”

“The World Jewish Congress is sending a message by bringing these groups that we are supporting the state of Israel,” Friedman told ILTV. “By bringing these groups here and showing them the truth about what is going on, it’s the best diplomacy we can do.”

Friedman did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about the trip. The Intercept also asked WJC for copies of materials given to the judges during the trip.

An anonymous statement by federal judicial clerks last month criticized the Israel trip.

Peter Joy, who studies legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, said it is often difficult to predict how judges will rule on recusal.

“They make a strong case for the judge to step down,” said Joy. “Here’s somebody who went on a trip, the explicit purpose of which was to try to get Israel’s point of view across.”

Cassandra Burke Robertson, director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, did not think it was a clear-cut case for recusal.

“The closest issue here is that it sounds like officials on the trip may have been providing specific information about the legality of the operation,” Robertson said. “But if the information was more general, then I don’t think it would be disqualifying.”

“Although Judge Nelson certainly COULD recuse, I don’t think recusal is required under the statute or Judicial Canons,” Rory Little, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, told The Intercept in an email. “He might recuse; it’s not a clear case in either direction.”

Arguments are scheduled for June 10, and the plaintiffs asked the 9th Circuit to rule on their emergency recusal motion by Thursday. A spokesperson for the 9th Circuit said the panel will address the motion, “presumably before Monday.”

The Justice Department, which did not oppose the recusal motion, declined to discuss the case.