Author: Ariel Gold

“You must ‘remember what Amalek has done to you,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admonished on October 28, announcing the “second phase,” a ground invasion, of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Amalek, in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), is a nation that ambushed the Israelites making their way to the Promised Land. Following the attack, which they were able to beat back, God instructed that they must never forget and must wage an eternal war until no trace of Amalek’s existence remains. Generations later, King Saul killed all but the Amalekite king, whose descendent, Haman, generations after that, in the story of Purim, plotted to kill all the Jews in Persia.

Netanyahu is notoriously secular in his private life. But, ever the shrewd politician, scripture is his language of choice to sell his war to Jewish supremacists in Israel and right-wing Evangelicals in the U.S.

Continue reading “Who Is Drinking Netanyahu’s Amalek Kool-Aid?”

The Fellowship of Reconciliation is horrified at the new war that has just broken out in Israel/Palestine. FOR, a pacifist organization since its conception in 1914 in Europe and 1915 in the United States, condemns the initiation of this latest stage of violent conflict. In condemning Hamas’s attack launched on Shabbat and Simchat Torah, we are also led to condemn Israel for its decades of occupation, siege, and human rights violations and abuses that have led up to this moment.

At least 100 Israelis have been killed, over 900 wounded. Dozens of Israeli soldiers and civilians are missing and Hamas is reporting that they have been taken hostage.. The Health Ministry in Gaza is reporting around 200 Palestinians killed so far by Israeli air strikes and over 1,600 injured and we expect this number to climb exponentially in the coming days. Among the strikes that Israel has already conducted, was the bombing of the tall Palestine Tower in Gaza City, which houses media institutions, offices, as well as apartments. According to Palestinian sources, the Department of Charitable Institutions building in Gaza City has been completely destroyed by airstrikes.

Continue reading “Statement From the Oldest Peace Group in the US on the Outbreak of Another Gaza War”

By every conceivable measure, South Sudan is a nation in acute crisis. According to the World Bank, eighty percent of the South Sudanese population lives below the international poverty line, only one percent of people have access to electricity, and this month a UN Security Council delegation warned that another full-fledged civil war could break out at any moment.

What South Sudan has in abundance however are guns, violence, and US sanctions that are preventing the government from helping its people.

South Sudan is the embodiment of so many ills that affect the world – colonialism, militarization, civil war, climate change, famine, and sexual violence. By the mid-20th century, Sudan, encompassing what is now South Sudan and Sudan, began to fill up with firearms. By 1966, the country had received 30,000 G3 rifles from West Germany. By the late 1970s/mid-eighties, with the US-Soviet proxy wars in full swing, US arms transfers to Sudan were so large ($1.4 billion) that combined with arms transfers from other countries, the country was dubbed "Africa’s arms dump."

Continue reading “What South Sudan Needs and Doesn’t Need”

The world took little notice last month when over 100 Bedouin, a third of them minors, were arrested in the Negev/Naqab desert in Southern Israel. They were protesting the Jewish National Fund’s planting trees on 300 dunams as part of a 5,000 dunam (1,236 acre) afforestation project on land where 300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live and farm.

Because the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund evokes images of the iconic blue box and such figures as Albert Einstein planting trees, too little attention has been placed on the role they have played, and continue to play, in Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Take the home of the Bakri family in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron for example.

Continue reading “We Need To Talk About the Jewish National Fund”