Chris Browne

[Earthsight @earthsight]

🚨One step forward, three steps back: landmark EU #DeforestationLaw to go through trilogues...again🚨

While world leaders meet at #COP29Baku to tackle the climate crisis, the @Europarl_EN has approved amendments that significantly weaken the #EUDR.

Read🔗https://t.co/JctAWTKggW

[Omar Baddar عمر بدّار @OmarBaddar]

Hundreds of politicians who armed, funded and cheered on the slaughter of 16,000+ children over the last 9 months are about to tell you that violence is a terrible thing that can never be excused or condoned.

[Alice R Fraser @aliterative]

Let’s reframe taxes as a monthly subscription service to public utilities so that tech bros will get behind the idea.

[Rawan Arraf @rawanarraf]

I just saw a video of a girl in Gaza, about 12 years who was alive, her jaw was blown off & hanging off her face & a medic was trying to keep it up. And the priority of @AustralianLabor in govt is to take revenge against @SenatorPayman for speaking out against this genocide.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

There are 20,000 Palestinian kids in Gaza estimated to be “lost, disappeared, detained, buried, under the rubble or in mass graves.”

That’s on top of the 14,000 kids who are officially classed as killed.

That’s according to a new Save The Children report.

Genocide.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Biden likes to say that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. But Israel is not a democracy. Not by a long shot. In fact, it is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world.

Here’s the reality: there are 5 million people living within the borders that Israel controls who do not have the right to vote over the government that determines virtually everything about their lives, and whose human rights under international law are unenforced and regularly violated. On top of this, there are another 6 million people from that territory who are so completely disenfranchised that they have no rights within it at all, and have been rendered legally “stateless”.

So what’s going on here?

Well, apartheid. Now, a lot of people get hung up on the “apartheid analogy”, because when they think of apartheid in South Africa they think of segregation and unequal rights among citizens, and they say this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Israel. But in the academic literature, this is known as “petty apartheid”, and it was only a minor part of the apartheid system in South Africa. The real action – “grand apartheid” – had much bigger designs…

Grand apartheid was the process of reshaping the territory. The idea was to forcibly remove the Africa population from the majority of the country (literally bulldozing their houses and putting them into trucks) and dump them onto tiny chunks of land called Bantustans. Then you put a border around the Bantustan, give people “citizenship” there, give it a flag and a coat of arms, and set up a parliament.

Taking this approach – ethnic cleansing – the apartheid regime shoved most of the African population into enclaves comprising just 13% of the land, and denied them any rights of citizenship within the “white” territory. White people justified this by saying Africans had rights in their own “countries”, the Bantustans. But of course the Bantustans had no real power, no economic sovereignty, no independent militaries, etc. The apartheid regime controlled their borders and trade.

Israel has followed the “grand apartheid” playbook, chapter and verse. The Nakba began the process of shoving Palestinians off their land, out of their homes, and either (a) into the enclaves that today form Gaza and the West Bank, where 5 million people live within borders Israel controls, or (b) into neighboring countries where 6 million people live as stateless refugees. The process of ethnic cleansing continues today.

The result? 11 million people are hived off from the realm of rights within their own territory, and denied the right to vote over the government that controls it. Minority rule by Zionists is declared “democratic” only because it excludes the majority of the population. Calling this democracy is an extraordinary farce.

There is no democracy within apartheid. Apartheid must be abolished – it’s as simple as that. The 11 million must be free to return to their land and homes, and they must enjoy full rights of citizenship within a fully democratic polity, including the right to vote over the state that governs them. Apartheid must fall and we must fight until it does.

[Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus @DrTedros]

A full military incursion into Rafah will plunge the crisis into unprecedented levels of humanitarian need. A ceasefire is urgently needed for the sake of humanity. #Gaza

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

Israel didn't manage to prove its allegations against UNRWA, just deprive it of $450 million needed to deliver food to starving civilians in Gaza. That's Netanyahu's starvation strategy and his hope to make disappear millions of Palestinian refugees. https://t.co/9gdkZOr9Ia

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

The murder of @WCKitchen staff is only the latest. The genocidal Israeli regime has sealed the border & destroyed crops, wells, bakeries & food stores, murdered 200 aid workers, targeted security for aid, blocked aid trucks & massacred starving people lined up for aid. #genocide

[Australia Institute @TheAusInstitute]

"Ditch the old business model of banking on holes & homes."

"That’s a Ponzi scheme whose maintenance will result in a country marred by low productivity, debilitating inequality, high inflation & low wages."

@yanisvaroufakis at #NPC today #auspol

[Nadine نادين @nadine_chemali]

81,000 people attended the Taylor Swift concert. A sea of people. Now imagine every one of those people no longer with us.
That’s less than how many people are dead or missing in Gaza at the moment.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Here’s how Western media coverage kills.

The ICJ issued a damning ruling and placed Israel on trial for genocide.

Media outlets failed to cover this accurately, taking heat off Israel.

So now Israel feels able to defy the ICJ order to stop killing Palestinian civilians.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

This appalling @nytimes headline, which in an instant erases the 23,000 Palestinian dead in Gaza & the flattening of a metropolis as populous as South London, may win the Gold Medal 🏅 for most biased, insensitive and bigoted headline of the war, in a very, very crowded field.

[Sally Rugg @sallyrugg]

The Australian Labor government cannot bring itself to condemn Israel’s indiscriminate killing of thousands and thousands of Palestinian civilians, including nearly 10k children, but has this to say about casualty-free attacks on commercial container ships:

[Tom Fletcher @UNReliefChief]

You think getting aid into Gaza is easy? Think again.

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

The UN has reported that half of the people in #Gaza are now starving- more than a million children, women & men & 90% do not have daily food. Israel’s forced starvation of #Gaza is the latest in a long catalog of genocidal crimes. The well of evil of this regime is bottomless.

[Euro-Med Monitor @EuroMedHR]

#Infographic| Statistics on the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip (07 October-24 November 2023)

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

“The worst ever.” Those are the stark words of @UNReliefChief Martin Griffiths, about the death and destruction in Gaza. Having worked in the field for decades, he adds “I don’t say that lightly.” Watch our full conversation.

[Chris Browne @deepbrownesea]

@LindaMottram @TheEconomist Looking forward to the Economist's deep dive into the IDF's sprawling financial empire