https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel
This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree
When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: “We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!”
The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a “regime of apartheid” (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also “accused” of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the “anti-Zionist” B’Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO.
As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls........
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Truth, reality, tradition and freedom: our resistance to the great uprooting
She has a background in radical ecology and calls for a new 21st century resistance that goes beyond the “stale and dusty categories” of “right” and “left”. [1]
What is at stake today, she says, is the very future of humanity, with a historic clash taking place between “two opposing visions of the world, of the living, of nature, of human beings”. [2]
“There are no more excuses. We can no longer wait for those who do not want to understand, those who pursue marginal projects, those who do not have a total and clear-cut critique of every aspect and every fundamental element in the transhumanist project”. [3]
“We need to find a firm shore: that line of resistance for those of us who are determined to remain anchored to reality, in defence of humanity and in defence of all that is living”. [4]
“Let’s form alliances to repel the transhumanist vanguard”....................
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https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2024/08/what-a-surgeon-saw-in-gaza
What a surgeon saw in Gaza
In this harrowing interview, a US doctor describes his recent experiences working in a Gazan hospital, where he treated children with horrific, often fatal, injuries.
When Feroze Sidhwa, a 42-year-old trauma and critical-care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in Northern California, signed up for a medical mission to work in a hospital in Gaza for two weeks, he knew he would have to take his own medical supplies. So he travelled with about 750lb of luggage on his British Airways flights from San Francisco to Heathrow and onward to Cairo. Everyone in his group took “tons of stuff”: a colleague, Mark Perlmutter, an orthopaedic surgeon, took hundreds of pounds of orthopaedic implants.
The mission went to Gaza with the World Health Organisation; the call for volunteers was distributed by the Society for Critical Care Medicine, which is how Sidhwa found out about it. He has degrees from the University of Texas and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. His father was born in Karachi, Pakistan, a few months before the Partition, and his mother was also born there, two years later. They are Parsis.
The European Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Strip, Sidhwa told me in an interview on 30 July, was considered to be the best hospital in Gaza. Yet what he found on arrival was a disaster: in terms of medical supplies, “what we took is...............