- Unlike the impunity the police have extended to far-right mobs, left-wing activists are facing detention and arrests for much less.
- Ben-Gvir boasted about Haifawi’s arrest on social media and upon his release, accusing the presiding judge, who happens to be Arab, of being “an enemy from within.”
- Repression of activists is not confined by the Green Line. On the day of Hamas’s attack, Palestinian human rights activist Issa Amro was taken from his home in Hebron by settlers and soldiers, who arrested him for over ten hours. He was cuffed, degraded, and attacked. Two weeks later, soldiers forced him out of his home for having guests — Breaking the Silence founder Yehuda Shaul and a foreign journalist — which he was forbidden from doing earlier that week.
- In Area C of the West Bank, as many Palestinians suffer displacement by violent settlers supported by the Israel Defense Forces, anti-occupation Israeli activists who seek to aid those Palestinians are facing attacks. In the now-abandoned community of Wadi a-Seeq, as settlers held Palestinian residents at gunpoint and tortured them for hours, soldiers joined the settlers in beating, robbing, and arresting Jewish activists on the scene. After the violence ended, authorities wiped activists’ phones to erase any trace of what had happened. In the village of At-Tuwani in Masafer Yatta, activists were shot at by a settler as they were filming his partners bulldozing an agricultural garden.
- As early as October 16, over a hundred citizens had been arrested or taken in for investigation over social media posts, among them actors, singers, and public figures.
- The Israeli government is now considering laws and regulations that would go still further. Potential changes include making “excessive consumption of terrorist media” punishable by prison sentence, banning foreign press and ignoring freedom of information requests for the duration of the war, attempting to revoke the citizenship of those charged with supporting terrorism, and a for-now-shelved proposal legalizing the use of live fire on protesters blocking roads during wartime. The police also attempted to ban all political protests, but ended up backing down.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/israel-far-right-government-suffocating-domestic-dissent-palestine-solidarity/

This community mental health approach, which I have contributed to designing with the Collaborative for Community Wellness, consists of three interdependent parts. First, to relieve police of their responsibility to function as mental health workers, it calls for the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) to build out a nonpolice mobile crisis response system for the entire city. Second, it entails reopening the network of nineteen public mental health centers that CDPH operated until the 1990s to now function as crisis reception and stabilization centers, as well as community hubs for everyday preventative outreach and supportive services.

Third, TNT revolves around hiring a large-scale community care worker corps comprised of lay residents from Chicago’s most dispossessed neighborhoods who are then trained and employed by CDPH in dignified, career positions (i.e. with compensation, benefits, and protections parallel to those currently given to police officers). These workers will collaborate and share tasks with supporting mental health professionals in communities with greatest unmet social, medical, and economic needs. It’s this last part — a bottom-up human infrastructure for community care that seeks “mental health for all by involving all” — that’s the most essential, transformational, and currently widely overlooked element of the TNT agenda.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/chicago-public-mental-health-policing-treatment-not-trauma/

The repression isn’t just coming from the top — the government is encouraging and empowering mass snitching campaigns and mob violence against Palestinians. Israel’s student union issued a call for students to report any “incitement to terrorism or support of terrorism” they see to an anonymous Google Form.

Throughout Israel, Jewish Israelis are taking up this call, reporting coworkers, classmates, and friends for their social media posts in support of Palestine. The examples of this “support of terrorism” included a photo of Gazan children captioned “Israel’s bank of targets” and a post reading, “Please delete me if you delight in the death of innocents.”

Alongside police violence and snitching, fascist mobs have taken to the streets to intimidate and attack Palestinians and their allies. Two weeks ago, a lynch mob of Jewish supremacists surrounded a dorm where Palestinian students resided and attempted to break through the gates while chanting “Death to Arabs.” The students were then evacuated, a stated goal of the mob’s far-right leader.

Fascist mobs have also come after journalists like Israel Frey, who had to go into hiding after a mob came to his house threatening to lynch him and his children. And in the West Bank, armed settlers have shot at Jewish Israelis for documenting their attacks on Palestinians.

he Israeli state was increasing repression from the river to the sea. In 2021, in response to mass Palestinian protests, the Israeli police declared “Operation Law and Order,” where thousands were arrested across Israel (only 10 percent of whom were Jewish). During this time, Zionists who openly lynched a Palestinian in Lod were released by police on the grounds of “self-defense,” the state refused to investigate hundreds of cases of intimidation and assault against Palestinians, and digital surveillance increased. What an anonymous activist described to us as “fascization of the police” from above and increased settler violence from below prepared the ground for the even more intense crackdown of the past few weeks.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/israel-cracking-down-internal-dissent-gaza-idf-benjamin-netanyahu/

"According to the Sunday Times account, between 2017 and 2020 McSweeney failed to declare £730,000 in donations from a slew of millionaire businessmen, misreported and underreported other payments, and falsely assured supportive MPs that electoral law was being followed.

A 2021 investigation by the Electoral Commission found Labour Together guilty of more than 20 separate breaches of the law, imposed a higher-end fine, and rebuked the organisation for failing to provide a “reasonable excuse”. But by then, as Pogrund and Yorke observe, “money at a scale rarely seen in Labour politics had already changed the party’s future, setting Starmer on the path to Downing Street.” McSweeney (and through him, Starmer) has since avoided being connected publicly to the scandal – until now.

The old Watergate adage of “follow the money” may at last be shedding some media light on Starmer’s political ascendancy. The Sunday Times revelations are of a piece with Starmer’s own refusal to reveal the donors to his leadership campaign until after the ballot when it was too late. Pull at the threads of this story and preferred official accounts of Labour party politics over the last five years begin to unravel, with a far more sinister picture of antidemocratic plotting and scheming emerging instead."

https://novaramedia.com/2023/11/14/the-corruption-behind-starmers-rise-has-finally-been-exposed/

- Billionaire Contributions Doubled in the 2020 Elections
- 'Dark Money' Tripled in the 2020 Elections
- Outside Spending Doubled in the 2020 Elections

https://readsludge.com/2023/11/01/three-striking-charts-about-money-in-elections/

Nelle settimane successive, tuttavia, le cose sono peggiorate visibilmente. L’ultimo sondaggio mostra che Donald Trump supera Biden in cinque stati chiave del duello (Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan e Pennsylvania) e il presidente si trova in vantaggio a malapena in uno (Wisconsin). Altrettanto significativa è la frattura all’interno della coalizione elettorale di Biden per il 2020 suggerita dai sondaggi. Tre anni fa, gli afroamericani sostenevano Biden con un enorme margine del 78%: oggi quel margine è solo del 49%. Sta inoltre perdendo notevole sostegno da parte degli arabo-americani e dei minori di trent’anni, il suo indice di gradimento è sceso di ben undici punti tra i democratici solo nell’ultimo mese.

https://jacobinitalia.it/biden-paga-lappoggio-incondizionato-a-israele/

Hinting at a new Red Scare, Trump used a Veterans Day speech to declare, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. . . . We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

He also recently proposed reinstituting the “Muslim ban” to prevent entry to the United States from certain Muslim-majority countries, he has floated a plan to fire tens of thousands of federal employees on political grounds, and he has said he will try to end birthright citizenship, enshrined in the 14th Amendment after the Civil War.

Last week, after saying immigration is “poisoning the blood” of the country, Trump and his advisors unveiled the anti-immigrant plan for his next presidency, which would essentially turn the United States into a police state. In his proposed effort to deport millions of people per year, Trump would reduce due process rights for immigrants, dramatically expand internment camps near the border, and “deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states,” the New York Times reported. The plan would also “shift from the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.”

In other words, Trump wants to hire police and reserve soldiers unfamiliar with immigration law to conduct public mass arrests of presumed undocumented immigrants with little or no probable cause

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/donald-trump-mass-violations-civil-rights-immigration-authoritarianism/

Trump has a plan to round up immigrants “on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.”, by preparing an “enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings.”

The plan is to do it so fast, and so drastically, that immigrant rights lawyers will be overwhelmed. Plus, Trump has a much more favorable judiciary, as he appointed many federal judges himself.

He has also vowed revenge against his political opponents, who he calls “vermin.” He and his team “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term”.
Trump claims that because he is being prosecuted for political reasons, it’s perfectly legitimate for him to turn around and conduct political prosecutions against the Democrats.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/take-trump-seriously-when-he-vows-to-build-the-camps/

Israeli bombers have attacked mosques, churches, schools, and universities (279 educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed); they have struck ambulances even at the very doors of hospitals, as well as hospitals themselves. On November 9 and 10, five major hospitals came under direct Israeli fire: al-Rantissi children’s hospital, the Turkish hospital, the Indonesian hospital, al-Quds, and al-Shifa Medical Center. On November 10, an Israeli drone operator fired a Hellfire RX9 missile at the courtyard of al-Shifa Hospital, a variant of the missile that instead of carrying an explosive warhead unfolds into an array of massive blades like those of a samurai sword, killing by dismembering anyone in its path, leaving bloody limbs and torsos scattered in the hospital forecourt. By nightfall, all the hospitals in the north of Gaza reported being under Israeli artillery and missile fire: showers of incendiary phosphorus just outside, buildings heaving with successive explosions, showering all within with dust and debris and in some cases shrapnel and shell casings. Medecins sans Frontieres reported Israeli snipers were firing into the hospitals themselves. Tens of thousands of terrified refugees have been sheltering in the hospitals, and those who tried leaving both the Rantissi Hospital and al-Shifa on November 10 were fired at by Israeli troops and had to return under fire. Both hospitals were reporting bodies scattered in the streets outside, beyond the reach of medics, who also came under fire when attempting rescue.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/physical-destruction-in-whole-or-in-part/#fn3-48727

ARTICLE FROM FEBRUARY 2023

An agreement was signed today between the Minister of Defense and the minister in his office, Bezalel Smotrich, for the transfer of governmental powers in the West Bank to the latter. Although the administrative authorities transferred to him do not include some military operational powers, this is a dramatic change in the structure of governance over the occupied territory. Very broad administrative authorities pertaining to the majority of the governing powers in the West Bank are being transferred into hands that are not of the military commander of the occupied territory. From now on, those powers will be held by the minister in the Ministry of Defense, who will de facto serve as the governor of the West Bank.

According to the agreement, the governor will be authorized to appoint officials in the Civil Administration and COGAT who exercise civil authorities, the legal advisors who will advise them, and he will be solely responsible for formulating policy.

The agreement includes two clauses aimed at obfuscating the transfer of powers by presenting the governor's alleged subordination to the Minister of Defense, but according to the document, the cases in which the Minister of Defense can override the governor are extreme cases and even when this is done, the military commander of the West Bank will be bypassed, as he no longer holds authority.

The agreement also states that the governor will work to deepen the powers of the Israeli governmental authorities in the areas of Israeli settlements, a process which will promote the unification of government powers and geographically expand their direct legal authority in the West Bank. Or, in other words: stretching Israeli sovereignty beyond the Green Line.

The agreement also states that the governor will lead a process of expanding the dual legal system so that Israeli legislation by the Knesset will be applied more fully than it is today to the Israelis in the West Bank.

International laws of belligerent occupation state that an occupied territory will be temporarily administered by the occupying force (that is, the army) which, along with security considerations, will be obligated to promote the interests of the occupied people.

Transferring powers to Israeli civilian hands is an act of de jure annexation because it entails removing power from the occupying military and placing it directly in the hands of the government - this is an expression of sovereignty.

The bottom line is that the agreement signed today is simultaneously a giant leap of legal annexation of the West Bank and an act of perpetuating the regime’s apartheid nature.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-23/ty-article/.premium/far-right-minister-gets-most-of-west-bank-authorities-outpost-eviction-left-to-idf/00000186-7e09-d35a-adbf-fe29303a0000