Author: Kathy Kelly

Originally appeared on World Beyond War.

During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with twelve different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19^th advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.

In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against the earth’s most desperate people.

Continue reading “Hanging On with Gaza”

On April 30, when Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” dropping a large banner out the windows above the building’s entrance. This was a hall famously occupied by students in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and against Jim Crow racism in the United States. The students are risking suspension and expulsion, and a very real blacklist has already been generated against them, with Congress joining in to define criticism of genocide as a form of antisemitism that state universities and state-linked employers will not be allowed to tolerate.

I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.

Continue reading “Unfurling Love from the Window”

In a work entitled “Irish Famine 4,” Palestinian-American journalist and artist Sam Husseini combined grass and paint to commemorate a bitter time in Irish history when starving people died with their mouths stained green because, according to historian Christine Kinealy, their last meal was grass. Shamefully, British occupiers profited from exporting out of Ireland food crops so desperately needed. Over a seven year period, beginning in 1845, one million Irish people died from starvation and related diseases. It was a conscious mass killing. One of the most horrific means of execution we can read about or imagine was employed. The result, an excruciating descent into despair, delirium and bodily immobility while one’s attention, and character, is gradually reduced to extreme hunger and pain.

Continue reading “When Starvation Is a Weapon, The Harvest Is Shame”

It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another to use one hand, as a small child, to try and dig your way out of the rubble that has collapsed upon you.

Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, a professor based in Jerusalem, spoke sadly of the reality in Gaza where, he said, “one child dies every ten minutes.”

“It was not the death of a child,” he said, ”but the survival of one, that made me really very, very sad.” He was speaking of a video which had emerged showing a child buried alive under rubble attempting to free herself with one hand.

Continue reading “Tunnels for Safety and Tunnels for Death”

Following a string of US "forever wars," a profusion of well-written, often riveting novels, memoirs, and analyses have been published. Talented authors have aimed to promote understanding about the human cost of war.

In the same period, mainstream media sources have continually developed ways to make war appear normal – something necessary, justifiable, or in some cases, "humane."

Norm Solomon’s War Made Invisible erects an edifice of evidence showing deliberate, consistent, coordinated and well-funded efforts to squelch movements opposing the vicious consequences of war.

Continue reading “Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible Refutes Collusion With War-Makers”

The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, "words are more powerful than munitions."

This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20^th, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.

Continue reading “Blood Does Not Wash Away Blood”