Green is a colour

A long but magnificent essay by Andreas Malm on the deep structures of fossil fuel capitalism and imperialism underlying Israel's genocide in Gaza. Make a brew - maybe two - and read it.

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth This essay is a lightly edited version of a lecture given at the American University of Beirut, The Center for Arts and Humanities and Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts on 4 April. We use the image above, White Phosphorous #2, with permission from the artist, Rafat Asad. Rafat is a Palestinia...

Naomi Klein on Zone of Interest and the "ambient genocide" in Gaza
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/14/the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-gaza-genocide

A sea of people standing with the Palestinian - and now Yemeni - people against the hateful, racist violence of colonialism and imperialism.

On Whitehall, we passed the small bust marking the spot where King Charles I was beheaded in 1649. How impossible must it have once seemed to defeat the absolutist monarchy? Yet here we are. However long it takes, the powers now raining death down on Gaza will prove no more unbeatable than was the House of Stuart.

Rishi Sunak's bombs falling on Yemen are one more reason to march tomorrow. See you there.

Nothing to see here

This is really shocking. Cleverly has got to go.

Jesus in the rubble: nativity scene at Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Tonight and tomorrow many of us celebrate the story of a displaced Palestinian woman giving birth in a stable.

Meanwhille in Palestine this week four women in labour, rushing to hospital under a white flag to give birth, were shot dead by Israeli soldiers who then ran over their bodies with a bulldozer.

Israel's bombing of Gaza has so far killed 1% of its population, not including those unidentified or trapped under rubble, and trapped most of the rest in the town of Rafah, prey to starvation and disease, not to mention further bombs.

The mayor of Bethlehem has compared Israel's killing in Gaza to King Herod's slaughter of the innocents in the Christmas story.

How many western politicians will celebrate Christmas tonight after backing Israel's genocidal terror in Palestine? May they choke on their turkey.

When the next generation asks why we didn't stop the genocide, don't you *dare* say "We didn't know". We know.

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The next national demonstration against Israel's genocidal war in Gaza has been called with a month's notice. This gives time to organise. To invite friends, family and colleagues. To book transport. Let's get everyone there. In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.

The reality of Sunak's war on refugees: death and despair. Remember this as the Tories squabble today.

Bibby Stockholm: Asylum seeker on board barge dies The man who died on the vessel, moored off Dorset, is thought to have taken his own life.

This is great: perspective on Gaza from a South African freedom fighter

South African guerrilla fighter Ronnie Kasrils speaks out on Palestine Kasrils speaks on the horror and the hope in Gaza

Which image best captures the horror of Israel's genocidal war in Gaza? The Israeli flag raised over the rubble that was a town? Or the mass arrest, stripping and beating of hundreds of civilian men, dozens of them summarily executed?

Israel's attack killed writer and academic Refaat Alareer yesterday. Here's what he wrote a few weeks earlier.

The continuing adventures of "the most moral army in the world": rounding up, stripping, binding and abducting dozens of ordinary men from Beit Laha in the bombed out rubble of the northern Gaza Strip, and taking photos the better to brag about it.

Israel's representatives and cheerleaders have of course said that the men are all Hamas fighters. If that were true, surely prisoners of war have certain rights. But Palestinians on social media have been identifying some of the men in the photo as civilian relatives and colleagues, including journalist Diaa al-Kahlout.

What will be done to them when the camera is turned off? Will anyone ever see them again? How many truckloads more are to join them?

Shame on all who have defended and enabled Israel's genocidal war. This colonialist terror must be stopped.

This face-stuffing house sparrow is all too relatable

Squirrel season

and senior position in shadow cabinet.

Our own team, now all displaced from their homes along with 1.8 million others in Gaza, have expressed the constant fear they and their families are experiencing. They feel they are being pushed ever southwards by the bombs, and fear being displaced out of Gaza into Egypt.

One staff member today told us: “Please let everyone know that there is no such thing as a ‘safe place’ in Gaza ... Nothing is left of our safety and dignity and that’s the actual war we are facing.” We are gravely worried for their lives.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and siege is making it impossible to sustain human life in Gaza. Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and siege is making it impossible to sustain human life in Gaza, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) has warned today.

floating castle
.. and other scenes of cloud inversion around Boscastle. The "castle" is in fact the National Coastwatch Institution, Boscastle station.

It is much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.

The “Harvard Law Review” Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here.

Gauze for Gaza: medical swabs painted in the Palestinian colours

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A Palestinian flag in gauze textures
Why is the death count from Gaza not getting updated? The hospital the health ministry worked out of has been turned into a "death zone", in the words of the World Health Organisation.

Yousef Aboul Rish, the head of the health ministry in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that people had left al-Shifa hospital pushing the injured on hospital beds and wheelchairs along a severely damaged road that was strewn with bodies from the fighting. "It was a terrifying scene with families and injured children, some with amputated hands who had been asked to walk in a straight line [single file] between two Israeli tanks,” he said.

Surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta has described sniper drones shooting people in the streets outside the hospital. And now, senior Israeli general Giora Eiland has written that "severe epidemics in southern Gaza will bring victory closer". Exactly the nightmare scenario that Israel's policy of devastation is making inevitable.

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As a small artistic protest against Israeli terror and British complicity, I am experimenting with the texture of gauze - a fabric used for wound dressings, named after and originating in Gaza - and the colours of the Palestinian flag.

Follow for updates from medics in Gaza, and donate to support their work if you can.

Why the fight for Palestine is a fight for the climate movement

Why the fight for Palestine is a fight for the climate movement Defending Palestine and the climate are one fight

This weekend, temporarily, Earth took its first step over the 2.0 degrees Celsius barrier.

Four refugees killed in Calais this week alone. This is the cost of the "stop the boats" Fortress Britain policy of denying safe passage to refugees means in practice. Death after death after death.

We are devastated to report that two refugees have been killed in a horrifying hit-and-run accident near Calais. They are the third and fourth refugees to be killed in the area this week alone.

The two men, who are believed to have been Turkish, were in a group of around fifteen refugees, walking on the motorway between Calais and Dunkirk. Around midnight, a van drove into the group, killing the two men on impact, and injuring four more. The driver reportedly fled after the collision.

Emergency services from across the region attended the accident. The four injured men are being treated in hospital, two in intensive care.

These tragic deaths follow the deaths of two Sudanese refugees in separate incidents earlier this week. Investigations into their deaths are ongoing. They bring the total number of refugees known to have been killed in Calais this year to twenty.

We believe this higher than usual number of deaths, as well as an increased number of injuries, is connected to conditions currently experienced by refugees in northern France.

Appalling weather conditions, an increased number of beach patrols, and more frequent and brutal evictions of sites are driving people to take more risks in already-dangerous situations. Heightened anxiety among the people we support has been noticeable for some time; this is not a state of mkind in which to make a desperate attempt to reach the UK that will endanger your own life.

This week at a vigil for Mohammed, one of the Sudanese men who died, his cousin spoke movingly of the fear and confusion that refugees experience in these unfamiliar surroundings, and how that alone increases their vulnerability.

There can be no more persuasive case for the introduction of safe passage to the UK for refugees. For the sake of those like them, please pledge your support:
https://care4calais.org/safepassage/

Gauze for Gaza: work in progress.

Palestinian flag in gauze textures, printed with acrylic paint and digitally rearranged

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Israel's "evidence" that Al-Shifa hospital was a major Hamas base is so flimsy that even the BBC - too often a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda - has called them out. No consolation for the dead. Every single one of the hospital's 54 ICU patients has died due to lack of electricity or supplies.

Similar fates could await Al-Quds and Al-Ahli hospitals, the former evacuated and the latter under siege according to the Palestinian Red Cross. And between the bombs and the siege, every operating theatre and maternity ward in Gaza is out of action. This is a territory filled, for obvious reasons, with the wounded. As well as the dehydrated, the hungry, the cold, the exhausted, the traumatized.

The UN Office on Genocide Prevention recognises as genocidal the act of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. The tribunal on Rwanda noted that this includes “subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes, and the reduction of essential medical services below the minimum requirement”.

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As a small artistic protest against Israeli terror and British complicity, I am experimenting with the texture of gauze - a fabric used for wound dressings, named after and originating in Gaza - and the colours of the Palestinian flag.

Follow for updates from medics in Gaza, and donate to support their work if you can.

In terrible times, enjoy this spider

Gauze for Gaza: work in progress.

Gauze bandage textures printed on paper with acrylic paint.

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The gutting of Gaza City's main hospital Al-Shifa is just horrifying to watch. Israeli soldiers shooting doctors and patients. Smashing down the walls of surgical units and digging up tiled floors, using other rooms as a detention centre for the interrogation of medics bound and stripped. A mass grave outside, the flag raised triumphantly on the roof.

The fact that anyone can defend this atrocity - this humiliation of a colonised people through mass violence against a hospital - makes me feel sick with rage and horror.

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As a small artistic protest against Israeli terror and British complicity, I am experimenting with the texture of gauze - a fabric used for wound dressings, named after and originating in Gaza - and the colours of the Palestinian flag.

Follow for updates from medics in Gaza, and donate to support their work if you can.

With your support, we stopped Rwanda!

Now let’s win our next legal fight and stop the segregation of asylum seekers in barracks and barges. Donate to our legal fund > crowdjustice.com/case/c4cwethersfield/