By Mary Uyematsu Kao
Netanyahu’s over-zealous response to the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 has dragged on for more than seven months. Over 35,000 civilian Palestinian deaths and the number continues to tick upwards as the death drone continues.
What we are witnessing today is the first live-streamed genocide via TikTok, the first AI (artificial intelligence) powered genocide, and the first genocide that lays bare the Democratic Party’s spinelessness.
As famine becomes a reality in Gaza, West Bank Jewish settlers can be seen trashing and blocking in-coming humanitarian supplies (youtube.com/watch?v=VeSlz19dXgw). Biden just approved another $1 billion in military aid to Israel from our tax dollars, on top of a $95 billion military aid pack-age to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan just weeks before. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/24/1246839045/biden-signs-95-billion-military-aid-package-for-ukraine-israel-and-taiwan#:~:text=Overcoming%20 months%20of%20opposition%20 by,remarks%20at%20the%2-0White%20House.
These are a few select examples of the widespread resistance that is gathering steam.
Self-Immolation, an Extreme Protest
Just over two months ago, on Feb. 25, Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. His last words: “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” www.thenation.com/article/society/aaron-bushnell-gaza-self-immolation/
25-year-old Bushnell was not the first self-immolation protest against the genocide. There is scant news of the first one that happened on Dec. 1, 2023 by a person with a Palestinian flag in front of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta. Atlanta police never released the name of the person, who was critically injured along with the security guard who tried to put out the fire.
Bushnell made sure that his act was documented. He posted the reasons for his action on several social media platforms. He used his own phone camera to record and livestream his protest. The New Arabdescribes the ironic response from police:
“As he was burning alive, an officer could be seen aiming his gun at Bushnell, while another could be heard in the background yelling that they needed a fire extinguisher, not a gun. The image of a man pointing a gun at someone in the midst of taking his own life quickly became a symbol of the brutality Bushnell was protesting and then experienced in his final seconds.” www.newarab.com/news/vigils-held-aaron-bushnell-who-self-immolated-gaza
While Bushnell received more press coverage than the first self-immolation protester, the mainstream media did not want to give it any lasting impact. At the grassroots level, Bushnell’s impact was amplified through many vigils held in his honor around the country.
One vigil, held on Feb. 28 in front of the Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, was organized by About Face: Veterans Against the War. As they declared “Remember Aaron Bushnell. He is not alone,” each veteran took off his military jacket and tossed it into a garbage can fire. Military personnel like Bushnell who commit such acts of conscience can be deadly for the military’s fighting will.
Google Workers Protest Project Nimbus
On the tech front, Ariel Koren, a former Google worker, was pushed out of Google in 2022 for speaking out against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract between the Israeli government and Google and Amazon. Koren says: “We might be seeing the world’s first AI-enabled genocide. But what Google is trying to do is to ensure that this is not the world’s last.” www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/14/palestine-protest-google-conference
The American Friends Service Committee reports: “While Google has a policy that forbids Google Photos “to promote activities (…) that cause serious and immediate harm to people or animals,” the Israeli military has been using Google Photos facial recognition in its mass surveillance of Palestinians. Google has refused to comment on how this policy applies to the Israeli military. afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
Mohammad Khatami, a Google worker interviewed on “Democracy Now,” explained the ethical conflict of working for Google:
“I come from a Muslim family. I was raised Muslim. And it’s really hard to wake up seeing the images of children slaughtered and know that…the work you’re doing is contributing to this. I’ve lost sleep. It’s just been extremely difficult to…think that you’re working for something that is contributing to the mass slaughter that’s taking place. And for speaking out against that, I’ve literally been called a supporter of terrorism.” www.democracynow.org/2024/4/17/no_tech_for_apartheid_google_israel
50 Google workers have been fired for demonstrating at Google to “Stop Fueling Genocide.”
A New Generation Ups the Ante
The student firestorm hit just as college graduations were under way in mid-April. Wikipedia reports: “As of May 6, student protests have occurred in 45 out of 50 states … with encampments, occupations, walkouts or sitins occurring on almost 140 campuses.” Locally we’ve seen the encampments at USC and UCLA dismantled by police.
Some of the worst violence happened at UCLA as non-student counter-protesters sprayed irritant, blinding students for hours, lobbed fireworks at them, and wielded metal rods and wood planks to beat up students in the encampment. The Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper, reported that the counter-demonstrators were ranting death threats: “I’ll kill you,” “I’ll rape your sister,” and “What Israel does to Gaza, we’ll do to you.”
These goons and thugs were given free reign for more than three hours as police stood by watching peaceful protesters getting pummeled. None of these rioters who brandished lethal weapons were arrested. The next day, over 200 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested as the encampment was dismantled.
Judith Levine’s article in The Guardian states that 25 students were hospitalized overnight from this melee. She raises a question that makes UCLA a watershed moment. “But something else is sliding past popular attention: the meaning of the events at UCLA. Vigilantes staged an assault on unarmed civilians and the state let it happen.This has occurred many times before in U.S. history, particularly when the victims were African American. Still, it is historic.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/article/2024/may/06/ucla-protester-mob-attack
There are college presidents who have not given in to police raids on the encampments. And this contributes great hope for the divestment movement. The faculty of many colleges have stepped up, not only to protect the rights of their students, but to protest and censure their college presidents’ violent crackdowns on the students’ freedom of speech. Pomona College faculty voted for divestment from “corporations complicit with war crimes and other human rights violations committed by the Israeli government in Israel/Palestine.” But now it has to go be-fore the Board of Directors.
There are negotiations taking place at several campuses on divestment and amnesty for the protesters. But with Biden’s declaration that these protests are anti-Semitic and illegal, is there a difference between a Biden World and a Trump World?!!
Most campus presidents have resorted to calling in the police to break up the encampments because they are a severe reminder of the genocide that we are engaged in. However, with each clash with the police, how many more students will become politicized on the direction of imperialist U.S. foreign policy?
Asian Pacific Americans Taking a Stand
What has been heartening is to see active participation of Asian Pacific Americans in these protests. Mike Lee, president of Sonoma State University, was put on leave for “insubordination” by CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia. He issued a campus memo announcing his concessions to the pro-Palestinian encampment protesters in exchange for dismantling their encampment.
Politico reports: “The punishment marks perhaps the harshest disciplinary action against a campus chancellor or president in California over the handling of protests of the war in Gaza. It also underscores an unwillingness to divest from Israeli weapons manufacturers …” www.politico.com/news/2024/05/15/sonoma-state-president-leave-gaza-00158285
JACL has been racked by this conflict. According to Amy Qin of The New York Times, the differences within JACL appear to be along generational lines:
The organization’s leaders and some older members were reluctant to take a position on the war, in part because of the league’s long-standing ties with prominent Jewish civil rights groups in the U.S. In the 1970s, the American Jewish Committee was the first national organization to endorse the push by Japanese Americans for reparations for their incarceration during World War II.
But younger members of the Japanese American group said that Palestinians were suffering from human rights violations and that their organization had long stood up for such victims. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/world/middleeast/jacl-israel-gaza-cease-fire.html
Defections from Genocide Joe’s Administration
It’s hard to know how many Biden staffers have resigned because of his Gaza policy, but there have been five public resignations. The most recent is Lily Greenberg Call, a Biden appointee in the Department of the Interior. Greenberg Call is the first Jewish staffer to resign.
She said, “My Jewish identity is the most important part of who I am, and it is all of the values that I was raised with … and all of my Jewish education, 20 years of it, that led me to this decision, and it’s how I know this is right. What Israel is doing to people in Gaza and to Palestinians across the land is incredibly unJewish to me and such a disgrace to our ancestors.”?
According to The Washington Post, Greenberg Call’s resignation letter argued that the U.S. had enabled “Israeli war crimes and the status quo of apartheid and occupation,” adding that such policies did not keep Israelis or Jews safe.
She continues: “The president has the power to call for a lasting ceasefire, to stop sending weapons to Israel, and to condition aid. The United States has used nearly no leverage throughout the last eight months to hold Israel accountable. Quite the opposite, we have enabled and legitimized Israel’s actions with vetoes of U.N. resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable.”
Other public resignations:
A U.S. Army officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency resigned from the military, writing that he felt “incredible shame and guilt”? knowing that his work contributed to Palestinian suffering and death.
A political appointee from the Education Department resigned in January, and a career State Department employee who worked on arms transfers to foreign powers resigned in October. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/15/jewish-staff-resigns-biden-administration-gaza/
Greenberg Call told Jewish Telegraphic Agencyabout the connections she made as a teen in 2014: “We did this wonderful coexistence seminar with teenagers in a Palestinian village in Israel. I was very buoyed by it, and by … some really genuine connections that were made between Jewish teens and Palestinian teens.”
After Oct. 7, Greenberg Call received text messages and phone calls from Palestinians she had worked with during her previous pro-Palestinian activism days. “That was incredibly moving, and … painful … to feel like we could understand each other and we could be there for each other. And there were so many … who just don’t understand the reality that no one is going anywhere and that like our safety and our futures are connected.”[my emphasis] www.jta.org/2024/05/16/israel/lily-greenberg-call-jewish-staffer-who-quit-biden-administration-over-israel-policy-there-are-so-many-of-us-who-feel-this-way
As we celebrated the birthdays of Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama on May 19, their legacies are bearing fruit as the hold of U.S. hegemony on the world gets shakier by the day. I can imagine the beautiful relation-ships that are being built between non-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, African Americans, and so many others — including Asian Pacific Americans — as this movement tries to figure out how to sustain itself. Friendships fortified by struggling together for a common cause are the real stuff for forging a new future.
The joke is, American exceptionalism can’t save American empire. The movement to stop the genocide in Palestine is a movement for saving the American people from the dictates of the 0.1% who have hijacked American democracy. You call this a democracy when the only votes that will count in November are for Biden or Trump? That sounds like a rigged electoral system to me.
Mary Uyematsu Kao is the author/photographer of “Rockin’ the Boat: Flashbacks of the 1970s Asian Move-ment” (June 2020). She has been contributing to The Rafu’s “Through the Fire” series for eight years. She was the publications coordina-tor for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center for 30 years. Com-ments and feedback are welcome at: [email protected]. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.