Category: Palestinian struggle for equality
Citizens head to court against city of Montreal

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Citizens head to court against city of Montreal

Montreal, January 18, 2018

Members of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) and the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) are suing the City of Montreal for compensatory and punitive damages for the city’s actions which occurred during the 2015 federal election campaign. The 5-day trial will begin January 22, 2018.

During the 2015 federal election campaign, the BDS movement and the CPC, both duly registered with Elections Canada, joined forces to denounce the pro-Israel policies of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party during the electoral campaign. BDS was registered as a third party and the CPC is a registered party which ran four candidates in Montreal. The election posters portrayed a Palestinian child murdered on a beach in Gaza during the 2014 bombings. Their aim was to raise the awareness of Montrealers concerning the cause of the Palestinian people.

These posters, identified as election posters in accordance with the Canada Elections Act, were nevertheless systematically removed by the City of Montreal, undermining the fundamental right to freedom of expression of BDS members and reducing the visibility of candidates of the CPC in the midst of an election campaign.

Following complaints to the Chief Electoral Officer, the City of Montreal has admitted to violating the law.

Today, although it recognizes this fact, the City refuses to acknowledge its fault in this case, forcing the continuation of the trial next week.

A joint release from the Communist Party of Canada and BDS Québec

New Orleans passes boycott and divestment resolution!
| January 15, 2018 | 9:14 pm | Local/State, Palestinian struggle for equality | Comments closed

First victory of its kind in the South! Is Houston next?

As you may have read in The Intercept, the New Orleans City Council made history last week by unanimously passing a resolution calling for a process to avoid contracting with or investing in companies that profit from abuses of human rights, civil rights, labor rights, and other violations.

The resolution was spearheaded by USCPR member group New Orleans Palestine Solidarity Committee (NOPSC). It is an important step toward implementing boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) in New Orleans to hold Israel accountable for its violations of Palestinian rights, and to stand with other communities struggling for their rights. 

The resolution was introduced by the New Orleans Mayor-elect and Councilmember, Latoya Cantrell, following an inspiring, year-long campaign by NOPSC. This is among the strongest municipal wins to date, encompassing both boycotts and divestment, and is the first of its kind in the South. We celebrate this victory today, on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, remembering the critical role of boycotts used in the Civil Rights Movement in protest of apartheid policies in the Jim Crow South.

This type of support municipal BDS campaigns is critical for putting pressure on Israel. Only two weeks into 2018, Israel has killed three 16-year old Palestinian boys, arrested scores of Palestinian men and boys in night raids, announced the construction of over 1,000 new housing units in the illegal settlements, extended the detention of teenage activist Ahed Tamimi, and issued a blacklist of organizations supporting BDS.

Israel has to know that its impunity will not continue. BDS wins, like the one in New Orleans last week, show that the tide is turning and Israeli apartheid’s time is running out.

Municipal campaigns similar to the one in New Orleans are underway nationwide, and this is just the beginning of what’s to come in 2018. Be a part of it: start a municipal campaign in your community! Click here for more information, including a webinar and toolkits on implementing municipal campaigns.

Make the change you want to see in your community, and know that standing up for Palestinian rights also involves standing up for other marginalized communities. As NOPSC organizer Tabitha Mustafa explained, “New Orleans is a city that has a tragic history with human rights. Whether in Honduras or Palestine or Vietnam, companies that profit from the misery of New Orleanians and our families abroad should not do business with the City of New Orleans.

From North Carolina to Oregon, from Missouri to Colorado to, now, New Orleans, municipal campaigns are a powerful tool to expose oppression and hold the perpetrators accountable. Learn how you can bring a municipal campaign to your community!

ANNA BALTZER

Director of Organizing and Advocacy

P.S. Be sure to share the great news on Facebook and Twitter too!

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US Campaign for Palestinian Rights PO Box 3609 Washington, DC 20007 (703) 312-6360
Bernie Sanders’ Powerful Record on Civil and Human Rights

Election 2016

20 Examples of Bernie Sanders’ Powerful Record on Civil and Human Rights Since the 1950sBernie Sanders

From fighting segregation to standing against police violence.

By Zaid Jilani / AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/20-examples-bernie-sanders-powerful-record-civil-and-human-rights-1950s?sc=fb

July 20, 2015

Over the past few months, one lingering attack on Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for the Democratic nomination is his supposed indifference to racial justice and civil rights issues.

But the truth is, Sanders has a 50-year history of standing up for civil and minority rights, as he told the attendants of Netroots Nation after he was interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters. Of course, it’s understandable that they want to bring attention to the movement. Killings of people from Ferguson to New York City to Los Angeles to Atlanta have finally brought important issues like police brutality, systemic racism, mass incarceration and militarization of the police into the center of national dialogue.

It is up to all candidates for the presidency, including every Democrat, every Republican and independent candidates, to address these issues in a forthright manner and to do outreach and communicate with communities that are besieged by these problems. Although his events in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas, where he loudly condemned police brutality and racism were a start, Sanders owes it to pay attention to these activists and listen to the concerns of marginalized groups whose civil rights have historically been suppressed. Sanders does have a record of fighting on these issues, and it should be only natural for him to be able to comfortably address them before a diverse audience.

Here are 20 ways Sanders has stood up for civil and minority rights, starting in the early 1950s up to the present year.

  1. Raising Money For Korean Orphans: International solidarity was an unusual concept for any American to have in the 1950s, let alone a high school student. But one of Sanders’ first campaigns was to run for class president at James Madison High School in New York City. His platform was based around raising scholarship funds for Korean war orphans. Although he lost, the person who did win the campaign decided to endorse Sanders’ campaign, and scholarships were created.
  2. Being Arrested For Desegregation: As a student at the University of Chicago, Sanders was active in both the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1962, he was arrested for protesting segregation in public schools in Chicago; the police came to call him an outside agitator, as he went around putting up flyers around the city detailing police brutality.
  3. Marching In March On Washington:Sanders joined the mega-rally called by the leaders of the civil rights movement, a formative event of his youth.
  4. Calling For Full Gay Equality:40 years ago, Sanders started his political life by running with a radical third party in Vermont called the Liberty Union Party. As a part of the platform, he called for abolishing all laws related to discrimination against homosexuality.
  5. Standing Up For Victims Of U.S. Imperialism In Latin America: While mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders formally protested the Reagan government’s policy of sending arms to Central America to repress left-wing movements. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to condemn the war on people there. He writes about it in his book Outsider In The House: “The trip to Nicaragua was a profoundly emotional experience….I was introduced to a crowd of hundreds of thousands who gathered for the anniversary celebration. I will never forget that in the front row of the huge crowd were dozens and dozens of amputees in wheelchairs – young soldiers, many of them in their teens, who had lost their legs in a war foisted on them and financed by the U.S. government.”
  6. Condemned And Opposed Welfare Reform and Dog Whistle Politics:While President Bill Clinton and most Democrats in Congress supported so-called welfare reform politics, Sanders not only voted against this policy change, but wrote eloquently against the dog whistle politics used to sell it, saying, “The crown jewel of the Republican agenda is their so-called welfare reform proposal. The bill, which combines an assault on the poor, women and children, minorities, and immigrants is the grand slam of scapegoating legislation, and appeals to the frustrations and ignorance of the American people along a wide spectrum of prejudices.”
  7. Vocally Condemned and Opposed Death Penalty and Prisons His Entire Political Career:Sanders has long been a critic of “tough on crime” policies. Here he is in 1991 condemning a crime bill for promoting “state murder” through expansion of the death penalty:

“My friends, we have the highest percentage of people in jail per capita of any nation on earth….What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars? Mister Speaker, instead of talking about punishment and vengeance, let us talk about the real issue. How do we get to the root causes of crime? How do we stop crime? … I’ve got a problem with a president and Congress that allows five million people to go hungry, two million people to sleep out on the street, cities to become breeding grounds for drugs and violence. And they say we’re getting tough on crime. If you want to get tough on crime, let’s deal with the causes of crime. Let’s demand that every man, woman, and child in this country have a decent opportunity and a decent standard of living. Let’s not keep putting more people into jail and disproportionately punishing blacks.”

He also voted for an amendment in the crime bill to eliminate the death penalty with life imprisonment.

  1. Voted Against Cutting Off Prisoners From Federal Education Funds: In the 1990s, there was a successful effort to end the Pell Grant program for prisoners, which was one of the most effective ways to reduce recidivism. Only a handful of members of Congress voted against the legislation, and almost all of them were members of the Black Caucus. Sanders was one of the few white members who opposed this effort. It passed by 351 to 39. Of those in the House who opposed that vote, few are still serving; Reps. John Lewis, Jose Serrano, Charlie Rangel, and Bernie Sanders stood together at that time and continue to serve today.
  2. Took  IMF To Task For Oppressing Developing World Workers: In a 1998 committee hearing, Sanderstook Clinton administration official Robert Rubin to task for not enforcing a provision to protect the rights of workers in Indonesia. “Tell the world now that no more IMF money goes to that country, goes to [dictator] Suharto!” he thundered to Rubin, who later went on to be the chief architect of policies that led us to the Great Recession. “The IMF historically does not have a good record in terms of the poor people of various countries,” he noted, standing up for the poorest black and brown people on the planet, tackling an institution few in Congress dare to criticize.
  3. Achieved High Ratings From Leading Civil Rights Organizations: A frequent critique of Sanders is that he is from a very white state. While this is true, he certainly has not ignored issues that matter to people of color. In 2002, he achieved a 93 percent rating from the ACLU and a 97% rating by the NAACP in 2006.
  4. Voted Against the PATRIOT Act:The USA PATRIOT Act was passed in a 98-2 vote in the Senate and a 357-66 vote in the House. Sanders voted against it, and has voted against renewing it every single time. The law has been used to violate the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans, but few know how extensively it has been used in the drug war; from 2009 to 2010, the law was invoked for 3,034 narcotics cases and only 37 terrorism cases.
  5. Opposed Both Iraq Wars on Moral Grounds: Sanders was opposed to U.S. involvement in both Iraq wars. While many simply talked about the war in terms of the impact it would have on the United States, Sanders went further, saying that the “death and destruction caused” would “not be forgotten by the poor people of the Third World.”
  6. Traveled to Costa Rica to Defend Exploited Workers:Sanders traveled to Costa Rica to help organize workers opposing the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). While many critics of trade agreements do so on the grounds that Americans deserve jobs that could be lost to foreign countries, Sanders instead practices a form of solidarity politics, saying that workers in both countries are being exploited by corporations and so we must organize workers in both countries.
  7. Endorsed Jesse Jackson, Spoke Up For Palestinians: In 1988, Jesse Jackson was the first competitive black candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. He came under fierce attack for his advocacy of Palestinian statehood. Sanders came to his aid, organizing Vermonters and winning the state for Jackson. Sanders was asked about Jackson’s comments on Palestine and defended him, saying that the Israeli assault on Palestinians was “reprehensible.”
  8. Strongly Condemned Police Violence Over the Past Year: One criticism of Sanders is that he avoids talking about police violence in favor of talking about the economy. While the economy forms the bulk of his pitch, he has repeatedly condemned police violence during the duration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Here he is in mid-August 2014, before frontrunner Clinton ever spoke about the issue. Here (8/20/14) are (8/24/14) a (8/18/14) few (6/6/2015) more (4/30/2015) examples(6/2015).
  9. Embraced Immigrants When Hillary Clinton Refused To Talk To Them: In 2014, young immigration activists repeatedly tried to talk to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton to ask her about executive action. While Clinton did not talk to them, Bernie Sanders was not only willing to talk, but agreed with their call for executive action.
  10. Defended Voting Rights Against Voter Suppression Efforts: Sanders earned the endorsement of radical rapper Killer Mike by his leadership on defending the Voter Rights Act and calling for expanding voting rights.
  11. Fought Against Employment Discrimination: Sanders was a strong supporter of legislation to end workplace discrimination against LGBT Americans.
  12. Called For End to War On Drugs, For-Profit Prisons and Migrant Detention Quotas:  Sanders supportsdecriminalizing marijuna, and believes the war on drugs to be a failure. Additionally, he has vowed to end for-profit prisons and immigrant detention quotas.
  13. Put Out Detailed Plan to End Economic Crisis in Minority Communities: Many argue that Sanders views the issue of racial justice in too myopic a fashion by focusing on the economy. But polling of both Latinos and African Americans shows that jobs and the economy is either their top concern or tied for their top concern. Gallup polling shows that 13 percent of Hispanics say immigration is their top concern; 47 percent say the economy is. Meanwhile, among black Americans, 13 percent say “race relations” is their top concern, tied with “unemployment/jobs,” an additional 10 percentage points go to the “economy in general.” Combined, economic concerns make up 23 percentage points while race relations compose 13 percent. If you add in healthcare, at 6 percent, another major Sanders theme, it gets you up to 29 percent. Add in poverty at 7 percent and education at 5 percent  and you’re up to 41 percent of African Americans naming Bernie Sanders’ top issues as their top issues.

This validates Sanders’ strategy of looking to the economy as the top concern of minority communities. He has put out a detailed strategy to target unemployment across America and particularly to attack Hispanic and black youth unemployment, which he introduced in August 2014, long before he announced for president.

None of this is to say that the Sanders campaign doesn’t need to do more outreach to a broad array of people; the rallies in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas were a start, as they featured heavy presence of Latino and African Americans. The campaign is reportedly set to meet with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference next week, and will be campaigning heavily in the Southeast starting next month, with an event in New Orleans at the tail end of this month.

But much of the criticism of Sanders seems more rooted in who he is — an old white guy from Vermont — than what he has done. If anything, the fact that he has done so much for civil and minority rights despite the fact that his constituency is not one that would naturally demand it speaks to his character and wide empathy that isn’t shared by many politicians.

Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet staff writer. Follow @zaidjilani on Twitter.

The Troubling Implications of Hillary Clinton’s Anti-BDS Letter
| July 13, 2015 | 8:26 pm | Palestinian struggle for equality, political struggle | Comments closed
Rally to support Palestinians
| June 28, 2015 | 9:43 pm | Palestinian struggle for equality, political struggle | Comments closed

IMG-20150623-WA0019

Bernie Sanders: Anti-Russian Propaganda and “Vermont Socialism”

28.06.2015 Author: Caleb Maupin

 
 http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/28/bernie-sanders-anti-russian-propaganda-and-vermont-socialism-to-strengthen-empire/

bernie_0The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders — an anti-Russia, Israel-supporting politician from Vermont — revives an archaic feud among leftists. The old debate about “sewer socialism” is back.

In the early part of the 20th century, there was a broad movement of people in the United States who advocated the overthrow of capitalism. Among them were many revolutionaries like Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster, Lucy Parsons, and Paul Robeson.

However, there was another current of people who called themselves “socialists” but had no interest in revolution. They were called “sewer socialists.” The term originated in reference to Victor L. Berger, a “socialist” who ran on a platform of improving the city’s sewer system and eventually became the mayor of Milwaukee. The sewer socialists did not want to overthrow capitalism, but simply to be elected to local public office and improve government policy. They wanted to make a global system built on exploitation of people all over the world a little more comfortable for those living within the western economic centers.

The battle between these two poles of the left movement – with the revolutionary and anti-imperialist wing of socialism on the one hand and the “sewer socialist” wing on the other — played out on a global level. Commenting on the debate, Russian socialist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin described the trend this way: “The bourgeoisie of an imperialist ‘Great’ Power can economically bribe the upper strata of ‘its’ workers by spending on this a hundred million or so francs a year, for its superprofits most likely amount to about a thousand million… this little sop is divided among the labour ministers, ‘labour representatives’… labour members of War Industries Committees… labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions…”

In the modern United States, it isn’t sewer socialism but “Vermont socialism” that plays the role of the ‘Labor Ministers.’ US Senator Bernie Sanders is running for president, and openly describes himself as a “socialist.” Despite using this word to describe himself, with many well intentioned anti-capitalist activists supporting him, Sanders’ platform in reality articulates a strategy for strengthening global monopoly capitalism and its expanding militarism.

Big Oil’s Campaign Against Russia

Currently, Wall Street is doing all it can to suppress Russia, a rising competitor on the global markets. US oil and natural gas corporations in particular want to attack and isolate the Russian Federation, as hydraulic fracking floods the market and drives down oil prices and profits. As Russia stabilizes and expands, continuing to export more and more natural gas, big business desperately needs to purge the country’s oil from the global market.

In service of the western oil and natural gas cartels, US agents overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine. The orgy of street violence in Kiev that deposed Yanukovich was conducted with the direction of the CIA and billions of dollars in US funding. In Ukraine, the intervention of the United States has pushed a formerly peaceful country into civil war and installed a fanatically anti-Russian government. Russia now faces a hostile, US-aligned regime directly on its doorstep. Civil war is unfolding as the peoples of eastern Ukraine have taken up arms against it.

US-funded terrorists are waging a campaign of death and destruction in Syria, another Russian-aligned country. Hundreds of thousands have already been killed. The US and its allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan continue to pour money into the so-called “Free Syrian Army” — a group that openly tortures, kidnaps, and beheads innocent people, and has a history of collaborating with ISIS.

Despite giving demagogic anti-corporate speeches, Sanders brags that he is even more in line with big oil’s anti-Russia campaign than President Obama. “The entire world has got to stand up to Putin. We’ve got to deal with sanctions, we’ve got to deal with freezing assets,” he declared in a TV interview with FOX news host Bill O’Reilly.

In the same interview, he declared: “You’ve got to totally isolate them politically. You’ve got to totally isolate them economically… You freeze assets that the Russian government has all over the world… International corporations have huge investments in Russia, you could pull them out…”

A “Socialist” who Loves War and Israel

Sanders is very much a friend of the military industrial complex. In his home state of Vermont, Sanders “rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.” While criticizing Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Sanders consistently votes for the massive US military budget. In fact, Sanders is vocally very supportive of Obama’s drone strikes program, and has worked to bring US military research corporations into his home state to set up facilities.

As a highly rated ally of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, Sanders has consistently voted and spoken out in support of Israel. When criticized for it, he often replies with standard Israel lobby talking points, saying things like, “Hamas is sending missiles into Israel… some of those missiles are coming to populated areas…” Other than vaguely saying that Israel may have “overreacted,” he blatantly supports and defends Israeli military policy.

Sanders openly believes that the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is “terrorism,” and that the existence of a “Jewish state” on Palestinian land is somehow ethical. In his 2013 interview with Playboy, he declared: “The Palestinians must fulfill their responsibilities to end terrorism against Israel and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

A Friend of the Rising Police State

As a loyal ally of military corporations, he not only supports their war against people in Ukraine, Syria, and Palestine, but also their profitable activities at home. Big business is making huge profits from a prison industrial complex as well as the rapid expansion of the role of police in US society. As police patrol the halls of elementary schools, and “stop and frisk” people on the streets without probable cause, it is young African-Americans who are their primary targets.

Sanders has never been an opponent of the prison industrial complex or the rising incidents of police violence. In Michael Moore’s 2009 film “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Moore interviewed Sanders and asked him to explain what it meant to be a socialist. Sanders responded with a vague, populist rant in which he portrayed the police as victims: “We’ve become very religious in worshipping greed. We put on the front pages of magazines guys who have made millions of dollars, we ignore the cops… who every day are doing so much in improving the lives of people.”

More recently, in response to the massive uprising against police brutality and mass incarceration in the United States, Sanders has declared: “Look, the issue here is…. I was a mayor for eight years, and being a cop is a very, very difficult job. But the word has got to get out that when police act inappropriately, and of course in this case there has to be a thorough investigation.” Sanders gives standard, Obama-style talking points on the issue, saying he supports “body cameras” and wants more community cooperation and involvement with police departments.

Inevitably, whenever the issue of police brutality is raised, Sanders changes the subject to economics. In response to the Baltimore uprising after the killing of Freddie Grey, Sanders declared, without ever even mentioning Grey’s name: “In the neighborhood where this gentleman lives, as I understand it, the unemployment rate is over 50 percent, over 50 percent. What we have got to do as a nation is understand that we have got to create millions of jobs, to put people back to work, to make sure that kids are in schools, and not in jails…. so they’re not hanging out on street corners.”

No one can deny that unemployment is a huge problem, especially for Black and Brown communities in the United States. However, Eric Garner wasn’t choked to death by a bill collector. The direct issue at hand is the fact that police officers have essentially been given a “license to kill” by the courts, and routinely face no penalty after blatantly and intentionally killing people of color.

By diverting the conversation to economics and not calling out the police in harsh terms, and then using racially loaded phrases like “hanging out on street corners,” Sanders is essentially saying: “If only Black people had more economic opportunities, they wouldn’t be worthless, low-life criminals who the police have to kill.”

A Bigger Slice of Empire?

Often Bernie Sanders is asked what it means to be a socialist. He does not respond with a call for public management of the economy, “workers’ control of the means of production,” a workers and farmer’s government, or any of the definitions of “socialism”  used by socialists historically. Instead, he talks about Norway, Sweden, and other US-aligned imperialist countries. He emphasizes that these countries have a national health service, and provide free university education.

Vermont itself is a good example of such policies existing in practice. Vermont has single-payer health insurance for its residents. Same-sex marriage is legal, as is smoking marijuana.

Vermonters, 95% of whom are white, according to the US census, live a little more comfortably than most people in the United States. As they enjoy their legalized pot and single-payer healthcare, the US military is testing its drones over their heads, flying them across the “Green Mountains” of Vermont. The state’s well funded public universities, where Vermonters pay much lower tuition, are contracted to conduct research into how to make these imperialist killing machines more effective.

Sanders’ political viewpoint, based on his experience of decades in governing his home state — where only 1.2% of the population is Black — has been: “If we give white middle class Americans a bigger slice of the pie, they will be far more willing to line up with Wall Street against Russia, China, Iran, and the Palestinians.”

Lenin accurately described leaders like Sanders as “opportunists and social-chauvinists,” saying, “They are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers…” Back in 1916, Lenin urged his followers to “go down lower and deeper, to the real masses… teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution.”

The following year, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were victorious. Capitalism, along with its mischievous and demagogic defenders like Bernie Sanders, was overthrown in Russia. That was nearly 100 years ago. How this battle will play out among 21st-century leftists remains to be seen.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/28/bernie-sanders-anti-russian-propaganda-and-vermont-socialism-to-strengthen-empire/

From Germany, with hypocrisy
| June 7, 2015 | 9:38 pm | Germany, Palestinian struggle for equality, political struggle | Comments closed

From Germany, With Hypocrisy: Steinmeier visits the Gaza Strip

by Emran Feroz

On Monday, Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited the Gaza Strip and “expressed harsh criticism”, as German media outlets put it, after witnessing the destruction of Israel’s last attack in summer 2014. “Life in Gaza is unbearable”, Steinmeier said, adding that the status quo is unsustainable. After hearing such news, one might think that this politician is a bold truth teller and critic of the occupation, a remarkable role for a German Secretary of State. But a closer look shows that Steinmeier has behaved with just as much hypocrisy as many other European politicians who support Israel without reservation. In fact, he may be an even greater enabler of apartheid than any of his peers.

The German foreign minister entered Gaza with the permission the Israeli government. His trip to Gaza was planned during his Israel visit, whose main purpose was to meet the new right-wing government. That Netanyahu’s coalition is the most extreme and openly pro-settler government in Israel’s history was completely ignored by Steinmeier. Netanyahu decided who Steinmeier was allowed to meet inside Gaza and whom he wasn’t. That meant zero meetings with anyone affiliated with the government of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. This practice is nothing new. Since Operation Protective Edge, in which more than 2.000 Palestinians have been killed, Western statesmen from Norway, Ireland and Spain, have visited the Gaza Strip on the Israeli condition that they would meet no one from Hamas. None protested the onerous, decidedly anti-diplomatic conditions imposed on them by Gaza’s occupier.

According to Steinmeier, Hamas is the main party to blame for the whole disaster consuming Gaza. For that reason, he demanded heightened security for Israel while demanding that Hamas stop firing rockets. Steinmeier conveyed the impression that both actors, Israel and occupied Gaza, are of equal strength and as responsible for the situation, while ignoring the hundreds of Israeli ceasefire violations over the past 9 months. As the massacre in Gaza unfolded, Steinmeier was one of those who publicly worried about people at Tel Aviv beach. During a meeting of foreign ministers at the end of July 2014, Steinmeier issued support for the Israeli aggression and pined about the empty beaches in Israel. In response, Turkey’s Ahmet Davutoglu became outraged and pointed out that in Gaza, the beaches were not empty but the streets were full of dead children.

It is relevant to note that many people were killed in Gaza by German weapons gifted to Israel at a deep discount as part of the overall package of German reparations for the Holocaust.

While in Gaza, Steinmeier even neglected to mention the Kilani family whose members were exterminated in an airstrike on a civilian home during Israel’s assault last summer.  Ibrahim Kilani and his family happened to be citizens of Germany. An engineer by trade, Ibrahim Kilani lived in Siegen for many years before he decided to return to Gaza. In fact, Kilani’s first wife and his other children still live in Germany. Until today, not a single representative of the German government has taken responsibly or issued a single statement of regret about this entire family of Germans wasted by a guided Israeli missile. “It seems that my family was outlawed”, is what Ramsis, Ibrahim’s son, told me.

German weapons kill Palestinians again and again, and the discounted weapons keep flowing into Israeli hands. Palestinians with German citizenship can be murdered in Gaza without any recourse. They are like ghosts who never existed. To even broach this topic in respectable German society is impossible and opens critics up to accusations of anti-Semitism and “Holocaust minimizing.” Calling the Gaza Strip what it is — the world’s biggest ghetto — is considered a “Holocaust comparison.” . The same goes for those who talk about the apartheid. Intellectuals like Ilan Pappe or Noam Chomsky, who use this term regularly, would never be able to publish a piece in most of Germany’s daily or weekly newspapers.

It is true, as Steinmeier said, that the status quo must end. But in the reactionary political atmosphere that produced figures like him, the German government might be the last entity to support this goal.