Thursday, June 12, 2025

The Irish Times:
"The beaches here in Israel are full. Just an hour’s drive away Palestinians are starving

June is here. Summer has arrived. And the beaches in Tel Aviv are full. Just an hour’s drive away, two million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation. The incongruity of those few words and the bizarre contrast of imagery – the busy beach in Tel Aviv, the dystopia in Gaza – are hard to digest, I imagine, for many in Ireland. They are perhaps shocking, incomprehensible, and sickening even. This, however, is the reality of life, and of course death, here in Israel and nearby Gaza.

Writing those words does not come with judgment. I am simply observing. I also went to the beach in Tel Aviv last weekend. My photograph accompanies the digital version of this article. I recently returned from a 10-day holiday in Spain with my two young daughters. As we descended into Ben Gurion airport, I was struck by the casual announcement of the El Al air stewardess when she politely requested passengers to donate to the spare change program to support children in need in Israel. I wondered if, when hearing those words, “children in need in Israel”, any of my fellow passengers thought for a moment about the estimated 18,000 Palestinian children dead in Gaza and the hundreds of thousands more on the brink of famine."
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/06/07/as-palestinians-starve-an-hours-drive-away-in-gaza-here-in-israel-everyone-went-to-the-beach/

-->Reporting on Gaza is pretty straight forward in the United States. The TV networks hardly report anything at all. Sometimes The NYT will print a groundbreaking story like that of professor Maura Finkelstein who was fired for speaking out about Palestine. But readers in the United States are never presented with their lack of caring while tens of thousands of children starve. We are never reminded of our amorality. We have to go to the Irish Times to express that.

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Common Dreams:
"Professors Express Outrage Over UMich's Use of Investigators to Surveil Gaza Student Protestors. 'My university has no business doing this,' wrote one professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Multiple professors expressed outrage on Friday in response to reporting from The Guardian, which found that the University of Michigan is making use of undercover investigators to keep tabs on pro-Palestinian groups on campus.

'My university has no business doing this. I love the University of Michigan, and this is not how we should operate,' said University of Michigan Law School professor Sam Bagenstos, writing from his personal Bluesky account.

The Guardian spoke to several unnamed students who said that they have been followed, recorded, or eavesdropped on private investigators. Students who spoke to the outlet tracked dozens of investigators who have trailed them around campus."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/michigan-gaza-surveillance

-->The big story here is the lack of any coverage of the US Government spying on students. You can even find the story in Israeli newspapers. But not here. Is the political surveillance by our government so pervasive that no one gets upset?

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Common Dreams:
"Devastating Report Details an Occupied Palestine on 'Edge of Erasure ...
The world is witnessing Israel relentlessly starve and bomb Palestinians with total impunity,' said one humanitarian worker in the region.

A new report by a leading Quaker social justice organization urges observers of Israel's bombardment and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and its accelerated annexation of the West Bank to see the 'escalating violations' not as isolated pushes for control of the occupied territories but something much more sinister and profound.

According to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), SC), the policies and violence Israel is perpetrating on people across the territories are 'systematic and risk the erasure of Palestinians.'

The group joined leading humanitarian organizations that have spent years providing aid and services to Palestinians in Gaza—only to have their work impeded and made deadly by the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) attacks—in releasing The Edge of Erasure, a comprehensive look at the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/palestine-occupation

-->The Western media isn't too interested in the erasure of the Palestinian people. There was very little coverage of this story.