A rally held on July 22 near the official residence of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass protested sales of Palestinian lands stolen by the Zionist regime. Organizers of the event include Al-Awda, Unmute Humanity, Yalla Indivisible Co., Justice 4 Palestine, Free Democratic Palestine Movement, and Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice among many others.

The theft of Palestinian lands – particularly in the West Bank – is just one component of the occupation of Palestine which the International Court of Justice has now (finally) declared illegal. The Zionist entity simply declares properties – which may include agricultural lands or even homes occupied by Palestinian people – to be owned by the state. Recently the properties have been sold throughout the United States, often at synagogues, and when activists show up to oppose the land thefts they are accused of antisemitism.

The People’s Power Assembly in Baltimore protested against one such sale in that city, and another demonstration took place at a sale in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York.

During a sale at a Los Angeles synagogue on June 23, pro-Palestinian protesters were assaulted by Zionist thugs who were waiting for them.

Mayor Bass and some LA City Council members, as well as Gov. Gavin Newsom and President “Genocide Joe” Biden, all quickly labeled the protesters as antisemitic after they were assaulted. But there was no worshiping happening on the day of the real estate sale. It was simply sales of property illegally seized by a U.S.-backed genocidal occupier.

In addition to the slander of antisemitism against the protesters, L.A. council member Katy Yaroslavsky proposed granting a million dollars to fund deeper collaboration between the Los Angeles Police Department and former Israeli storm troopers.

The response by the city council, the mayor, and others in the context of the genocide in Gaza, aroused a great deal of anger. Activists who went to the city council meeting that followed the violent attack on the protesters forced the million-dollar grant proposal to be held back. Organizers who demonstrated July 22 are now pushing for Mayor Bass to retract her claims of antisemitism against the protesters and end the sales of stolen land in Los Angeles. The struggle will continue at city council meetings and in the streets of Los Angeles. 

As Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians continues, so does the theft of Palestinian land. Real estate events that sell off illegal settlements acquired through settler violence in the West Bank happen in the U.S. with the aid and permission from local elected leaders.

On June 23, there was a sale of Palestinian land in Los Angeles, California. The promotional materials included a photograph that looked a lot like Gaza’s shores. According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that fits the image of Zionists wanting to clear out the land for more settlers – an ethnic cleansing operation of murder and starvation against the entire population of Gaza and the West Bank.

Although the sale was held at Adas Torah synagogue, it was not a worship service. It was a venue hosting the My Home in Israel real estate agency, which promotes prospective home ownership in Israel (occupied Palestine).

Yet, pro-Palestinian protesters at the real estate event were met with violence from Zionists while the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stood by and offered them no protection. The corporate media vilified the protesters and inaccurately labeled them as anti-Semitic terrorists preventing worship in a synagogue. The Zionists present attacked the media as well. An open letter by the human rights group Unmute Humanity encouraged CBS News to end its complicity in the lies and distortion of events: “Contrary to your report, the peaceful demonstrators, which included Palestinian and many Jewish community members advocating for the basic human rights of Palestinians, were not blocking the synagogue. Instead, they were brutally attacked by a pro-Israel mob explicitly calling for the genocide of Palestinians. This included people being forcefully pushed, sprayed with mace, verbally assaulted, and harassed as they were followed to their cars. Ample video documentation supports these claims.”

The real estate event hosted by the synagogue advertised land sales in Palestine through My Home in Israel. This organization is notorious for supporting illegal settlements, not only here in Los Angeles, but nationally in the U.S. and internationally. The occupation in Palestine took effect in 1948, and for the past 75 years, the occupation has grown more complete with settlements and theft of Palestinian homes.

On its website, My Home in Israel brags about the astronomical rise in home prices, “Israel’s housing market has seen a significant shift, with the number of new homes sold reverting to levels last seen five years ago, yet at prices that are 40% higher … Overall, 23,250 new homes were sold in the first quarter of 2024 … The market’s return to five-year-old sales figures, coupled with a significant rise in prices, highlights the dynamic nature of Israel’s housing market as it adapts to changing economic conditions and demand.”

That “dynamic nature” of economic conditions and demand are exactly what was planned. According to a United Nations report on March 8, as of September 2023, there were approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

“The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said. Turk stated that the use of settlements on occupied land amounted “to a war crime under international law.”

Those shocking levels of Israeli violence took off in the year prior to September 2023, just about one month before the united Al Aqsa Flood military response by a united Palestinian force, including Hamas, began on October 7th. Another UN report stated that violence from Israeli settlers had displaced over 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2022. The report documented approximately three settler-related incidents per day resulting in the emptying of five Palestinian communities, six were rendered half-empty and seven more have lost a quarter of their population.

Peace Now is an Israeli rights group that monitors illegal Israeli settlement expansion. The group noted that Israeli land seizures in the Palestinian territory this year are the greatest, by far. “The size of the area designated for declaration is the largest since the Oslo Accords, and the year 2024 marks a peak in the extent of declarations of state land. Since the beginning of 2024, Israel has declared 23,700 dunams (5,855 acres) of the West Bank as State Lands.”

Once property is designated as state land, Israel no longer recognizes it as privately owned by Palestinians. Regarding the land theft declaration on June 25th, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a position in the Defense Ministry stated on social media, “Building the good country and thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state. MTA is meeting this morning to approve over 5,000 housing units,” he wrote, using an acronym for The Higher Planning Council.

The ad in the Jewish Journal for the Los Angeles event on June 23rd states, “Come and meet representatives of housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel.” – the use of “Anglo” with the implication of better neighborhoods is fitting for a country that practices apartheid, white supremacy and genocide.

“My Home in Israel” real estate events are also happening on the East Coast. The PAL (Palestinian Assembly for Liberation) Law Commission filed cease-and-desist letters to the real estate company that hosted My Home in Israel events and to the synagogues that rented the company space. The tour visited Teaneck, New Jersey; Lawrence, New York; Brooklyn, New York; and Toronto and Montreal in Canada.

Lamis Deek, an attorney with the PAL Law Commission, filed complaints with the Attorneys General of New York and New Jersey requesting that these sales events cease, as they are in violation of international law. “Imagine seeing your family’s lands being sold online while you helplessly watch. This stirs a rage and a pain that is indescribable. It’s an injustice that should shock the conscience and mobilize authorities and attorneys to action.”

One week after the June 23rd real estate event by My Home in Israel, over 20 organizations including Jewish, Palestinian, human rights and anti-racist organizations demanded that LA City Council members vote against a resolution that was introduced by Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky that would provide $1 million of public funds to racist Zionist vigilante groups such as Magen Am that are composed of former IDF and US military soldiers. Magen Am boasts of its law enforcement connections: “If, G-d forbid, an incident occurs that requires immediate attention, Magen Am is able to push it all the way up the chain of command. We have direct connections at the FBI and Local law enforcement, including the LAPD, Sheriff’s Department, DA’s office and the US Attorney’s office.” The action or rather inaction of the LAPD on June 23rd confirmed that Magen Am’s claims of law enforcement support were quite credible.

The proposal was supposed to provide funding to protect pro-Israel Zionists from violence, but the reality is that even mainstream media outlets have clearly reported that the majority of the violence that took place at the UCLA encampment in May and at the Adas Torah  Palestinian land auction event was clearly committed by pro-Israel counter-protestors.

According to the Los Angeles Times the proposal by the council member was intended to mirror Governor Gavin Newsom’s California State Nonprofit Security Grant Program . While funding from Newson’s program won’t be available until the fall, Yaroslavsky’s proposal would have expedited funding. After protest of the plan, the Councilwoman modified the proposal to provide protection for all houses of worship but increased the funding proposal from $1 million to $2 million.

Mayor Karen Bass immediately vilified pro-Palestinian protesters for simply protesting against genocide and labeled their actions as “anti-Semitism.”  Additionally Bass appeared at the Simon Wiesenthal Center with a further condemnation and promises of public funding. .

Black misleadership politics was in full effect after June 23rd. It is especially sad when Black politicians do not remember that our history in the U.S. is a long history of the theft of our land, enforced by Jim Crow’s twisted legality, which looks like Israeli apartheid and the Zionist vigilantes that Biden, Bass, and Newsom want to hire to keep us silent.

But the action at City Hall sent that proposal packing to another day. Bass and her colleagues will have to answer to the people. We won’t be silent.

John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center For Social Justice In Los Angeles and a leading member of the Socialist Unity Party. He accompanied former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on many anti-war delegations abroad. Parker was only 18 when he organized his first union election–at a small steel plant in New Jersey. Having authored a $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2014, his organizing efforts helped to push the city to act on the minimum wage increase proposals in Los Angeles. John Parker is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. 

Source: Black Agenda Report

The Israeli Occupation Forces launched airstrikes on the Red Sea port of the Hodeidah Governorate, in Yemen on Saturday, July 20. The Israeli airstrikes targeted gas, oil and power facilities within the Ansar Allah-run sea port with F-35 fighter jets, according to media reports.

The Yemeni Health Ministry announced that a number of people were martyred and wounded in the attack without providing further details. The Israeli airstrikes on Yemen came around one day after Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces launched a drone attack against the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. This was part of the military operations which the Yemeni Support Front has initiated in response to Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza.

A couple of hours after Hodeidah port was attacked by the Israeli Occupation Air Force, the Yemeni Armed Forces announced in a televised statement, that the Israeli enemy targeted the power station, the port, and fuel tanks in the Hodeidah governorate with airstrikes, and that all these targets are civilian facilities.

The spokesperson of the Yemeni Armed Forces, Brigadier-General Yahya Sare’e, also said in the statement that Ansar Allah will respond to the blatant Israeli aggression on Yemen and will not hesitate to strike the enemy’s vital targets. He also reaffirmed what was declared in Ansar Allah’s previous statement in regard to considering the occupied Yafa area as an unsafe zone.

Sare’e confirmed that the Yemeni Armed Forces will continue their operations in support of their brothers and sisters in Gaza, regardless of the implications and consequences. He added that they have prepared the means for a prolonged war with the Zionist enemy until the aggression on the Palestinian people is halted and the siege is lifted.

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, also condemned the Israeli aggression on Yemen. Hamas called on all countries and forces of the Arab Islamic nations to condemn the aggression, urging them to unite, mobilize resources, and engage in confronting the usurping Zionist enemy. Islamic Jihad stated that the Zionist crime against Yemen confirms that the criminal entity poses a danger to all the peoples of the Arab and Islamic nations. It also pointed out that the aggression against Yemen would not have happened without the blatant Western support for the criminal entity, primarily by the US and UK who have also been launching airstrikes against Yemen since January.

Source: Peoples Dispatch

Sullivan & Cromwell’s guilty record

“No Irish need apply” is a famous folk song that’s been performed by Pete Seger. Written in 1862, the song tells of an Irish immigrant who’s seeking work but is always told, “No Irish need apply.”

Discrimination in hiring is a U.S. capitalist tradition. Black unemployment rates are almost always at least twice as high as those for whites.

Right up to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, hundreds of U.S. newspapers ran separate help-wanted ads labeled “white” or “colored.” It wasn’t until 1973 that the U.S. Supreme Court banned ads that sought only “male” or “female” applicants.

Now, it’s Palestinians and their supporters who are being targeted. Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the biggest corporate law firms, doesn’t want law school graduates who’ve protested the mass murder of Gaza’s children and their families.

According to the New York Times, “The firm is scrutinizing students’ behavior with the help of a background check company, looking at their involvement with pro-Palestinian student groups, scouring social media and reviewing news reports and footage from protests.” 

So much for freedom of speech and freedom of thought. This is like how Communist Party members and others were fired during the 1950s and later.

For over a century, Sullivan & Cromwell have been the legal mouthpieces for the Rockefellers, the world’s first billionaire family who founded Big Oil. Netanyahu’s apartheid regime massacres Palestinians and serves as a U.S.-paid mercenary for Big Oil.

The law firm has an even longer record as an agent for U.S. imperialism and colonialism. It distributed $40 million from the U.S. Treasury ― worth around $1.3 billion in today’s money ― to unknown French Panama Canal company stockholders. (“The Panama Affair” by Maron J. Simon.)

Future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles became senior partner of Sullivan and Cromwell in 1926. His brother, future CIA Director Allen Dulles, was also a partner.

A filthy record

The Wall Street law firm helped Nazi business cartels like IG Farben. John Foster Dulles didn’t want his sister, Eleanor Dulles, to marry a Jew.

As U.S. spy chief in Switzerland during World War II, Allen Dulles tried to negotiate a separate peace with the Nazis. This was done behind the back of the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people to the fascist invaders.

In these conversations, Dulles was quoted as saying, “He was fed up with listening all the time to outdated politicians, émigrés and prejudiced Jews.” (“Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network,” by Leonard Mosley.)

But John and Allen Dulles’ old law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, must not hire any supporters of Palestinian freedom! 

Sullivan & Cromwell was also the law firm for United Fruit, which strangled Central America with its banana plantations, railroads, and steamship lines. When Guatemala’s elected President, Jacobo Árbenz, attempted to distribute some of United Fruit’s unused land to peasants, the Dulles brothers were determined to overthrow him.

Árbenz was overthrown by the CIA in 1954. One of the CIA agents involved was future Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt.

The year before, the tag team of John and Allen Dulles staged a coup in Iran to get rid of the elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. In the decades following, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in both Guatemala and Iran. 

Flag pins and bigotry

Another big law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell ― usually known as Davis Polk ― also refuses to hire Palestinian supporters.

The “Davis” in the law firm’s name refers to John W. Davis, who was the 1924 Democratic presidential candidate. He was nominated because convention delegates who were Ku Klux Klan supporters refused to vote for New York Gov. Al Smith, who was Catholic.

Davis was an unvarnished white supremacist who opposed any laws to stop lynching. When he was 80, Davis argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of school segregation.

While few people may be directly affected by these law firms’ bigotry, other employers are singling out Palestinians as well. After a couple of bigoted passengers on Delta Airlines objected to two flight attendants wearing Palestinian flag pins, Delta said it would only tolerate U.S. flag pins. 

Delta has a long record of racism and union busting. Former Delta CEO Carleton Putnam wrote the notorious “Race and Reason.”

The racist pamphlet became a bible to the White Citizens Councils, which were an uptown partner of the Ku Klux Klan. The Nazi David Duke distributes it today.

The anti-Palestinian witch hunts are just another variety of racist poison.

Next week, on Wednesday, July 24th, Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to visit Washington, DC, although he has not yet received a formal invitation. When the Israeli prime minister has traveled to Washington every year, he’s conveyed a message of closeness and intimacy, unlike the 4 years since his last visit to the White House, something that does not go unnoticed by friends and enemies.

Netanyahu is scheduled to address a special joint session of Congress and is expected to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House, although this has not yet been confirmed. A meeting with the next U.S. president-in-waiting Donald Trump is also expected to be organized.  When Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2015, then-President Barack Obama was angered that Netanyahu spoke before Congress against the Iran nuclear deal he had negotiated and refused to meet with him.

Meanwhile a national demonstration is being called by a wide range of organizations to greet the Zionist president by surrounding the US Congress to take a stand with the Palestinian people and to demand an end to the genocide.

Since Netanyahu accepted an invitation last month, extended by leaders of both parties in the US Congress, it sparked a public debate in Israel over whether he should accept or not, before it was known whether he would receive an invitation to meet Biden.  Arguments against Netanyahu’s acceptance included that such a visit, initiated by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, was not something that pleased the White House and would only highlight partisan divisions over Israel. It has emerged that between the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 19, experts estimate that there will be those who will accuse Netanyahu of trying to meddle in American politics, which could strain his relationship with Biden.

The last time Netanyahu was in the White House was in September 2020.  Donald Trump was president and the occasion was the signing of the so-called Abraham Accords.  Both Trump and Netanyahu lost elections soon after:  Trump in November 2020 and Netanyahu in March 2021.

In 2023, when Biden belatedly invited Netanyahu, as a sign of his disapproval of the prime minister’s policies, the president was politically strong, having emerged victorious from the midterm elections, when a forecast of Republican control in both houses of Congress failed to materialize.  On the other hand, Netanyahu, facing unprecedented popular opposition to his judicial reform plan, was politically weak.

Now the dynamic has changed. Both leaders are weak and both face strong calls to step aside: Biden from within his own party and Netanyahu from a street of increasingly loud protests. At the same time, Trump, with his superhero image, cannot go unnoticed by Netanyahu. And it is because both leaders are politically weak that experts believe that a meeting at the White House could benefit both: “Netanyahu will try to reaffirm his capacity as a statesman and Biden will try to demonstrate his leadership skills and mental acumen.”

Alfredo Garcia Almeida is a  journalist, international analyst and collaborator from Mérida, Yucatán.

Source: Radio Havana Cuba (RHC) / Resumen Latinoamericano – English

A violent and illegal bombing campaign on Yemen by the U.S. and Britain has failed to deter Ansarallah from continuing its maritime blockade against Israel

The leading medical journal says that ‘indirect deaths’ of Palestinians from Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure would far exceed those killed directly by the bombing

Thousands of people in New York City “celebrated” the Fourth of You Lie by demonstrating for Palestinian freedom. They rallied in Manhattan’s Union Square, where hundreds carried Palestinian flags and signs.

The rally and march were called by the Shut It Down for Palestine Coalition, which includes the Palestinian Youth Movement, The People’s Forum, and PAL Awda: the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, among many others. 

Among the speakers was Omowale Clay, a member of the International Secretariat of the December 12th Movement. Clay urged protesters to carry the struggle to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, both famous Black communities in New York. 

People marched up the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) in a loud, fast-moving procession several blocks long. Many onlookers showed their support.

Police harassed the march throughout, arresting five people along the route.

The protest wound up in Times Square. Speakers denounced the nearby military recruiting station where young workers, usually unemployed, are enticed to do the dirty work for Big Oil.

In the evening, thousands more gathered in Washington Square in solidarity with Palestine. They marched from there to the Hudson River, where crowds gathered to watch the annual fireworks display. 

NYPD goons tried to block the marchers, but protesters circumvented their barricades and marched through the West Village, drawing applause from people on the sidewalk. Cops violently arrested 22 people, including an Orthodox rabbi who was holding placards condemning Zionism and supporting the Palestinian people.

Frederick Douglass famously asked, “What is the Fourth of July to a slave?” He answered: “a day that reveals to him [and her], more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he [and she] is the constant victim.”  

Palestinians, of whom 40,000 have been killed in Gaza by Genocide Joe’s bombs, have no more reason to celebrate the Fourth of You Lie. Free Palestine!

On July 2, over 20 organizations, including Jewish, Palestinian, human rights, and anti-racist organizations, demanded that Los Angeles City Council members vote against a resolution that would provide $1 million of public funds to racist Zionist vigilante groups. Following is the talk given at the protest by John Parker of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice.

If you go to the occupied Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank, you will see a giant 20-foot statue of the late South African President Nelson Mandela. The statue is located in a square named after Mandela.

Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” 

In our fight against Israeli genocide, we have good company.

When we are denied our right to protest against Israel’s genocide and the continuing theft of Palestinian land being sold right here in the U.S., right here in Los Angeles, we have good company in our experience of repression and violence. When we are vilified for calling Israel an apartheid state … we have good company.

We are here because we are told that we don’t have a right to protest against genocide for basic human decency. It is especially sad that Black politicians and a Black mayor right here at City Hall do not remember how our history in the U.S. is a long history of the racist theft of land, many times enforced by the Jim Crow birth of the Ku Klux Klan which looks a lot like the Zionist vigilante groups that hire former Israeli Defense Forces that teach warfare tactics. And right here in the Los Angeles City Hall, a motion was presented to gift $1 million of public funds to Ku Klux Klan-like organizations that promote ultra-violent actions for simply trying to stop the sale of occupied Palestinian lands.

Last Sunday, there was a sale of Palestinian land with a picture that looked a lot like Gaza’s shores that Netayanu is clearing out for more settlers by attempting to kill and starve the entire population of Gaza and then the West Bank.

The flyer advertising stolen Palestinian lands says: “Come and meet representatives of housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel.” – These Zionist real estate agents don’t even have the decency to hide their white supremacist apartheid fascism.

This sale is hiding behind a Synagogue – but if the Ku Klux Klan were selling our land in a Christian church or a mosque or a synagogue, we would still protest that racist sale. But Karen Bass and Joe Biden wanted to encourage a fascist militia to attack us and deny the little constitutional rights that we have left. And we know that this will inspire more racist attacks by the LAPD that prioritize Black and Brown people and now especially Palestinians.

It is odd that Los Angeles is suffering from a housing crisis that continues to increase despite the city’s inadequate band-aids. They would rather use $1 million to gag our calls for justice.

Well, I’ll tell you what. After this press conference, we will be marching to city hall to demand the council members had better not even entertain the thought of funding to violently force our silence – because we have good company in inspiration given by the fortitude of the Palestinian people and all of the fighters against apartheid.

On May 23, 2024, Clarence Thomas was interviewed by brother Husayn Karimi. Karimi is one of the organizers of the successful People’s Conference for Palestine held in Detroit, Michigan, from May 24-26. Thomas’ statement on the video interview was intended to be aired during a Labor for Palestine Workshop at the conference. 

Shown here is the raw video footage. Unfortunately, the edited final presentation was not shown as planned. An unexpected appearance by a Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions member caused a major adjustment in the program.  

Thomas’ interview is relevant not only in view of ILWU Local 10’s nearly two decades-long Palestinian solidarity actions. He explains why union actions in solidarity with Palestine to end the U.S./Zionist campaign of genocide – both here and around the world – are in the interests of the unions themselves. Please share the video widely.