Hundreds of protesters, led by Jewish Americans, protested Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip at the New York Stock Exchange on October 14, 2024.

 (Photo: Jewish Voice for Peace/X)

200+ Jewish-Led Protesters Arrested at NY Stock Exchange Say 'Stop Arming Israel'

"The U.S. war economy is profiting from genocide," said Jewish Voice for Peace. "The 50+ members of Congress who invest in arms companies get richer every day."

As the Israeli assault of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon continued on Monday, over 200 Jewish-led protesters, including descendants of Holocaust survivors, were arrested at the New York Stock Exchange while demanding that the United States "stop arming Israel and profiting from genocide."

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—which has led several anti-genocide protests across the country over the past year of war—said that hundreds of people joined the action in New York City. The advocacy group shared photos and videos on social media of participants in red T-shirts with messages including "Not in Our Name" and "Stop Arming Israel."

They sat in rows outside the iconic NYC building with banners that said, "Jews Say Stop Arming Israel," "Arms Embargo Now," "Jews Say Divest From Israel," "Gaza Bombed, Wall Street Boomed," and "Fund FEMA Not Genocide," a reference to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responding to damage from hurricanes in the Southeast.

As NBC News reported on Monday:

Individuals representing Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led pro-Palestinian group, arrived at the exchange at 85 Broad St. as part of an "unscheduled protest" just before the stock market's official 9:30 am opening, according to a New York Police Department spokesperson.

A number of arrests were made, the spokesperson said, but an exact figure could not immediately be obtained. An NYSE representative said at least one person had handcuffed himself between an interior and exterior door.

JVP, which said that over 200 people were arrested, posted footage of multiple protesters in red shirts chained to a door and a fence and of officers carrying away demonstrators. The group said that "police are dragging Jewish protesters by their arms and legs as they refuse to leave the global epicenter of capital on Wall Street."

"As Gaza is bombed, Wall Street booms," the group said. "The stock prices of weapons manufacturers have skyrocketed this year. The U.S. war economy is profiting from genocide. The 50+ members of Congress who invest in arms companies get richer every day."

As Common Dreams has reported, stocks of American war profiteers—including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX, formerly known as Raytheon—soared in response to Israel launching its assault on Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack as well as earlier this month, after Israeli forces began a ground invasion of Lebanon and Iran fired off ballistic missiles.

"Remember that members of Congress are permitted to own stock in war manufacturing, so when they vote to send more bombs or send our loved ones to war, they profit personally," U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said in early October.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, has introduced the Stop Politicians Profiting from War Act, which would prohibit federal lawmakers along with their spouses and dependent children from trading defense stocks or having financial interests in companies that do business with the U.S. Department of Defense.

"Politicians should not be allowed to profit from genocide," said MacArthur fellow Ros Petchesky, an 82-year-old JVP member who was active in the movement to end the war in Vietnam, and the oldest person chained to the Wall Street gates on Monday. "There can be no business as usual while the U.S. arms Israel and profits from genocide. We’re here to demand an arms embargo now."

Israeli forces—armed by the U.S. government—are "massacring family after family in North Gaza in a war of extermination," JVP said Monday. "On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Israeli military carried out a mass extermination in North Gaza, raining down bombs on refugee camps and school shelters. They are still massacring family after family now."

The Israeli attacks on al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and multiple refugee camps in just the past two days have slaughtered dozens of Palestinians and wounded many more. Since last October, at least 42,289 have been killed and 98,684 others have been injured, though thousands more remain missing. Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.

U.S. President Joe Biden "wants us to believe that his $18 billion slush fund this year for the Israeli government is for 'Jewish safety,'" JVP declared. "As Jews, we reject this myth with every fiber of our beings. We refuse to let our traditions, histories, and identities be used to massacre Palestinians."

"This Indigenous Peoples Day," the group added, "we pay homage to the movements that have fought against genocides Wall Street has always profited from, since its founding as a market of enslaved people kidnapped from Africa by settlers who carried out genocide against Indigenous people."

COMMON DREAMS

 

Israeli terror attack in Lebanon injures thousands, kills 9

in World

by Andre Damon

18/09/2024

A Civil Defense first-responder carries a wounded man whose handheld pager exploded at al-Zahraa hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024 [AP Photo/Hussein Malla]

Israel launched a coordinated terror attack throughout Lebanon Tuesday, triggering tiny bombs which it had hidden in thousands of pagers that exploded simultaneously, killing nine people and wounding 2,750 others.

The pagers were given out to members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and military group, US officials told the New York Times. Thousands of the pagers exploded indiscriminately in homes, hospitals, schools and shops, killing and injuring bystanders. Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was among the injured in the attack.

“Around 3:30 p.m. today, a very large number of wounded people with pager communication devices in their possession began arriving at hospital emergency rooms in the following areas: the suburbs, Beirut, the south, especially Tyre and the Bekaa,” said Dr. Firas Al-Abyad, Lebanon’s Minister of Public Health.

He added, “So far, the health emergency room at the Ministry of Public Health has recorded about 2,800 wounded, about 200 of whom are in critical condition and require surgery or admission to intensive care units. More than 150 units of blood have been provided. A preliminary toll has recorded nine martyrs, including an eight-year-old girl.”

He continued: “The majority of the injuries recorded were distributed between the face, abdomen, hands and eyes.”

The Israeli attack included the commission of multiple war crimes, including violating the laws of war regarding assassination, treachery and the prohibition of indiscriminate bombing.

Commenting on the attack, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote, “What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.”

Responding to global revulsion to the mass killing, Eylon Levy, Israel’s former government spokesman, defended the mass bombing, declaring, “It was literally an attack on personal devices given only to operatives of a terror organization. That’s the definition of a targeted counterterror attack.”

The bombing spree was likewise endorsed by Democratic US Senator John Fetterman, who wrote in a post on X, “I fully support efforts to target and neutralize any existential threat like Hezbollah” after sharing a screenshot of the news report of the attack.

The New York Times, citing US officials, said that “Israel hid explosive material in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon.”

The Times continued, “The explosive material, as little as one or two ounces, was inserted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials.”

The attacks occurred just 24 hours after Israel’s security cabinet met to declare that it had “updated the objectives of the war” that had previously targeted Hamas following the October 7 attacks to include returning Israeli residents to Northern Gaza—a euphemism for escalating Israel’s war on Lebanon.

In August, Israel launched its largest attack on southern Lebanon since 2006, involving over 100 air force fighter jets. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that the attacks involved over 40 targets.

Israel’s strikes on Lebanon are part of a US-backed military escalation throughout the Middle East, with the central target being Iran. The US is simultaneously sponsoring Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of over 40,000 people.

In April, an Israeli strike killed a group of Iranian military officers meeting in Damascus, to which Iran responded with a strike on Israel with 300 missiles and drones, nearly all of which were intercepted.

In July, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, senior member of Hezbollah, with a strike in Beirut, followed by the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at a military guesthouse in Iran.

These attacks followed the visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, where he vowed to expand the Gaza genocide into a war targeting Lebanon and Iran.

Following Netanyahu’s address to Congress, he met with Vice President Kamala Harris, who vowed, “I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

In this month’s presidential debates, both Harris and former US President Donald Trump expressed their unequivocal support for the Gaza genocide and threatened both Iran and Lebanon.

Even as Israel expands its targeting of Lebanon, its ongoing mass killing, starvation and ethnic cleansing of the population of Gaza continues and intensifies.

On Monday, Gaza’s health ministry published the names of 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israeli massacres since the start of the genocide—a figure that includes neither those missing nor those who died of hunger and disease.

The first 14 pages of the document list 710 infants under the age of one. All told, the list includes 11,355 children under the age of 18.

In October 2023, James Elder, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, warned that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children.”

He added, “Our gravest fears about the reported numbers of children killed becoming dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands were realized in just a fortnight. The numbers are appalling. Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.”

With the publication of the list of the thousands of children killed by the Israeli military, these warnings have been horrifyingly confirmed.

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

Tags:

Lebanon Pager Attack, Palestine

 

Partners in Genocide: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians with Western Arms

Ramzy Baroud08/18/2024

( Middle East Monitor ) – While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.

For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.

The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.

The Geneva Academy, a legal research organisation, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.

Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the academy.

The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.

To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential“.

The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of 19 June, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.

The Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.

Should the war have ended on 19 June, 7.9 per cent of the population of the Gaza Strip would die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths,” according to the medical journal.

Palestinians in Gaza are not dying because of an untraceable virus or a natural disaster, but in a merciless war that can only be sustained through massive shipments of arms, which continue to flow to Israel despite the international outcry.

On 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) resolved that it had enough evidence to suggest that genocide was being committed in Gaza. On 20 May, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, added his voice, this time speaking of deliberate acts of “extermination” of Palestinians.

Yet, weapons continued to flow, mostly coming from western government. The main source of weapons is, unsurprisingly, the United States, followed by Germany, Italy and Britain.

Despite announcements by some European countries that they are curtailing or even freezing their weapons supplies to Israel, these governments continue to find legal caveats to delay the outright ban. Italy, for example, insists on respecting “previously signed orders” and the UK has suspended the processing of arms export licenses “pending a wider review”.

Washington, however, remains the main supplier of arms to Tel Aviv. In 2016, both countries signed another Memorandum of Understanding that would allow Israel to receive $38 billion of US military aid. That was the third MoU signed between the two countries, and it was intended to cover the period between 2018 to 2028.

The war, however, prompted US policymakers to go even beyond their original commitment, by assigning yet another $26 billion ($17 billion in military aid), knowing full well that the majority of Gaza victims, per United Nations estimates, are civilians, mostly women and children.

Therefore, when the US urges an end to the war in Gaza while continuing to flood Israel with more weapons, the logic seems utterly flawed and entirely hypocritical.

The same hypocrisy applies to other, mostly western countries, which brazenly pose as defenders of human rights and international peace.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute  (SIPRI), the world’s top ten exporters of major arms between 2019 and 2023 include six western countries. The US alone has a 42 per cent share of global arms exports, followed by France at 11 per cent.

The total arms export of the top six western states amounts to nearly 70 per cent of the global share.

If we consider that the vast majority of armed conflicts are all taking place in the Global South, the obvious conclusion is that the very West that purportedly champions global peace, democracy and international law is the very entity that also fuels wars, armed conflicts and genocide.

For the Global South to take charge of its future, it must fight against this obvious injustice. They cannot allow their continents to continue to serve as mere markets for western arms. The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of western countries.

True, it will take much more than limiting the arms trade to end global conflicts, but the free flow of weapons to conflict zones will continue to feed the war machine, from Gaza to Sudan and from Congo to Burma and beyond.

One can continue to argue that Israel must respect international law, and that Burma must respect human rights. But what use are mere words when the West continues to provide the murder weapon, with no moral or legal accountability?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

—
Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Here’s what’s in the US’s $20 billion weapons package to Israel | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”

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About the Author

Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

INFORMED COMMENT

 

GENOCIDE

Watering Down Genocide: No More Moral Compromises on Palestine, Please

RAMZY BAROUD07/27/2024

( Middle East Monitor ) – Why are many amongst us still tiptoeing around language when it comes to the horrific Israeli genocide in Gaza?

Layers of censorship imposed on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices in corporate and social media seem to have blurred the judgment of some. They continue to speak of a “conflict”, calling on “both sides” to use “restraint” and, partly, blaming the Palestinian resistance for the ongoing Israeli massacres.

Though such language is expected from the “sensible” few of mainstream media, there are those who are counted as “pro-Palestine” intellectuals, journalists and activists who often use similar language.

Throughout the years, the common wisdom is that, for a pro-Palestine voice to be published in mainstream US-western newspapers, he or she would have to adhere to a certain set of rules and avoid certain adjectives to describe Israel – even if such vocabulary is consistent with good sense, international law or the judgment of leading human rights organisations.

By “watering down the language”, one supposedly gains greater credibility, thus space to be heard or published.

Equally true, it is also practically forbidden to defend the Palestinian people’s internationally recognised rights to use all forms of resistance, or to support their democratic choices, because the outcomes of which are, maybe, not consistent with mainstream western thinking.

Some are even afraid to use the term “resistance” altogether. But if Palestinians are denied their most basic right to resist, they become deprived of any human agency, let alone relevance as political actors. The notion would then suggest that Palestinians can only serve the role of victims, and nothing else. Not only is this untrue, and condescending, it is outright bigoted, as well.

All this tiptoeing around what should have been a clear language on Palestine, comes at a price. When the truth is masked or hidden, the space becomes open for lies, deceptions and quasi-truths.

In this alternative space, Israel is, at best, equally culpable for the ‘war’ in Palestine as the Palestinians themselves; and, at worst, the Israeli army is merely engaging in a state of self-defense.

Additionally, by tightly controlling the discourse on Palestine, the West has harmed its own interests. Indeed, by marginalising authentic Palestinian voices, the West has lost its ability to understand the context behind the current Israeli war on Gaza, to accept or navigate its share of responsibility in the genocide and to play any meaningful role in bringing the atrocities to an end.

The outcome is an unavoidable cognitive dissonance – where western governments are violating the very rules they had created, opposing the laws they enshrined and investing in an Israeli genocide in Gaza, while criticising war elsewhere.

76 years on, Palestinians are still living the Nakba – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

I doubt that the West will ever succeed in claiming any moral authority, retrieve its lost credibility or build lasting trust with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims or the Global South. The extermination of one’s people entitles a person to some degree of cynicism.

To further expose western duplicity in Gaza, however, we must learn to speak with no reservations, no matter the restrictions on the pro-Palestine voice or the censorship on social media.

Naturally, not all Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices agree on everything. There are those willing to risk everything, and those who want to tell some kind of truth without risking the loss of their privileges, careers or standing in society.

It is those in the former group who deserve platforms and must be celebrated for their courage.

One of the most inspiring examples are young students in US and western universities who have risked their own futures – as in being expelled from universities or denied their degrees – for raising awareness about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Those students are the true leaders of justice-based solidarity movements, now and in the future.

They have understood that, due to the unprecedented censorship of authentic Palestinian voices in all media platforms, their actions on campuses, in the streets and every available venue are critical.

The risks they have taken by speaking out for Gaza’s genocide victims will serve as a new threshold of courage that will inspire the youth of this and future generations.

Equally important is that these students have refused to compromise on their language, their demands and their priorities to simply fit in, to get published or use a genocide as an opportunity to build careers.

As for those who exploited the Palestinian suffering for their own benefit, neither history nor the rest of us will forgive their opportunism and intellectual timidity.

Those who are well-intentioned, but “water down” their language to circumvent censorship, ultimately make little difference, because there are certain truths that cannot be softened or diluted.

Indeed, there is no other honest way of phrasing what is taking place in Gaza but as a genocide, one for which only Israel – a military occupier and apartheid state – can be blamed.

The only Palestinians who deserve blame or condemnation are those who are collaborating with Israel to ensure the outcome of the war remains consistent with their interests, financial status and false titles. No amount of money or prestige will ever redeem the credibility or honour of such people.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” said George Orwell. Sadly, we live in these times. It is equally true that, in a time of genocide, not telling the truth is the most contemptible of all acts.

Please continue to speak out; be radical; be revolutionary and never equate between those carrying out the genocide and those resisting it – even if at the risk of not fitting in.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

About the Author

Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

INFORMED COMMENT

Week in Review: The Dangers of a Trump-Vance Ticket

 

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