Without their faces catalogued in a military database.
Without their every move surveilled.
Without their routine actions falsely criminalized.
Without their homes made so unsafe that they have no choice but to leave.
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As the article details, the Israeli military uses facial recognition throughout the West Bank — not just at checkpoints, but also to surveil public areas and private homes.
“We no longer feel comfortable socializing because cameras are always filming us,” said a Hebron resident.
And the Blue Wolf app — which tells Israeli soldiers if a Palestinian is to be detained, arrested, or "left alone" — entailed soldiers competing to collect the most photographs of Palestinians against their will.
Reminder: the US sends this military $3.8 billion per year.
The Israeli military's 24/7 monitoring of Palestinians' daily lives has predictably (and likely intentionally) led to false criminalization of mundane actions.
To whom does a fallen teaspoon resemble a thrown stone, other than soldiers trained to dehumanize and vilify?
Israeli surveillance has also led many Palestinians to leave their homes.
This is all too convenient for the Israeli government and settlers, whose project of displacing Palestinians and Judaizing the West Bank is often met with the kind of resistance we see in Sheikh Jarrah.
The alignment of goals between the Israeli military and settlers is also one of tactics: White Wolf, another facial recognition app, allows settlers to scan Palestinians' IDs.
This elevates settlers to a quasi-official status and represents unabashed settler-state collusion.
This pervasive surveillance is a clear violation of privacy. It is recognized as such in Israel's '48 borders (as well as in 12 US cities and, hopefully soon, European Parliament.)
But Israel is an apartheid state with different rules for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
While we fight the use of facial recognition technology in the US, we also must fight it in Palestine.
These struggles are not just similar, but connected: the Israeli military exports its technologies of occupation around the world after field-testing them on Palestinians.
Our movement has had prior success campaigning against surveillance in Palestine. @lizzadwoskin's article states Microsoft divested from Israeli facial recognition company AnyVision this May; actually, it did so in early 2020 after pressure from @MPower_Change, @SumOfUs, and JVP.
Thank you to the brave and honorable testifiers at @BtSIsrael who shared their knowledge and experiences for this disturbing and revelatory article. Read more: washingtonpost.com/world/middle_e…
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While millions of Americans cast their ballots, our tax dollars continue to fund the eradication of Palestinians from North Gaza. From Gaza to Lebanon, the US is enabling the Israeli military to inflict a litany of atrocities across the entire region.
On Friday, the heads of 15 humanitarian organizations issued the grave warning that the entire population of North Gaza is at “imminent risk of dying.” And news of the ongoing atrocities coming out of Gaza only emphasize the myriad of ways the US is allowing the Israeli military to carry out genocide.
Today, the Israeli military announced it had “completed” the division of northern Gaza. This means the majority of Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from the area. This cannot continue.
In the past year, the Israeli military killed more than 180 media workers in Gaza and at least eight in Lebanon. Now, the Israeli government is attempting to preemptively justify the assassination of the few remaining journalists in North Gaza, who are documenting the Israeli military’s horrific campaign of extermination. This is just the latest tactic in the Israeli government’s wider strategy of systematic attacks on the media to cover up its war crimes. 🧵
Last week, the Israeli government designated six journalists as members of Hamas in order to lay the groundwork for justifying the Israeli military’s potential assassinations. These six journalists–Anas Al Jamal, Hossam Shabat, Talal Aruki, Alaa Salama, Ismail Abu Omar, and Ashraf Saraj–report from the frontlines, and they risk everything to document Israeli war crimes. And now, the Israeli government has placed a target on their backs.
This is nothing new. The Israeli government systematically targets journalists, and it has killed more media workers in Gaza in the past year than the Russian military killed in Ukraine. Every single instance of the Israeli military killing a Palestinian journalist is a war crime. Journalists are civilians protected under international law. They should be able to do their jobs without the fear that they will be killed.
The student movement for a liberated Palestine isn’t going anywhere! And as they stand with their Palestinian peers, Jewish students are bravely demonstrating that their Judaism is inseparable from their in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We stand with them.
To honor the Jewish festival of Sukkot, hundreds of JVP students and other Jewish student groups across the country erected Gaza Solidarity Sukkahs on their campuses. Inside the beautifully decorated, hand-made Sukkahs, Jewish students gathered in prayer and protest as the Israeli government continues to invoke Judaism to fuel its genocide.🧵
Students built Sukkahs on at least 22 campuses. Almost half were forcibly dismantled by university police and staff, and in some cases destroyed by pro-genocide agitators. In destroying students’ Gaza Solidarity Sukkahs, universities confirmed their primary goal of silencing support for Palestinian freedom, even at the expense of Jewish practice.
Gaza Solidarity Sukkahs were held at: American University, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Occidental, Rutgers, Swarthmore, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, University of Chicago, UNC Charlotte, UPenn, University of Rochester, USC, University of Washington, Western Washington University and Yale. Haverford College students participated in the nearby Sukkah at Bryn Mawr. The American University Sukkah was built with the participation of students from George Mason, George Washington, Georgetown and the University of Maryland - College Park.
At Northwestern, UC Berkeley, University of Washington, UCLA, UNC Charlotte, Yale, Swarthmore, NYU and American University, admin and staff destroyed the Sukkahs, robbing students of the ability to practice their faith.
The Israeli military is carrying out an extermination campaign of mass slaughter against the 400,000 Palestinians in North Gaza. This is ethnic cleansing.
In haunting footage released by the Israeli military, Israeli forces can be seen lining up Palestinians near Indonesian Hospital, where many had taken shelter or were receiving treatment, and were forced to evacuate by Israeli forces. Among the rubble and bombed-out buildings, men were separated from women and children, who were forced to flee at gunpoint, uncertain if they would ever see their fathers, husbands, and brothers again. Some men were reportedly executed. Medical personnel inside the Indonesian Hospital described bodies piled up outside. These images of calculated killings inescapably echo the Nazi Holocaust.
The Israeli military has imposed a total siege on the area, starving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in North Gaza, preventing essential aid like food and medicine for over three weeks. The hospitals that remain standing are surrounded by Israeli tanks. Today, Israeli forces are firing at Kamal Adwan Hospital, where hundreds of patients have sought medical care and shelter. The Israeli military is burning down UN schools where Palestinians shelter to ensure no one is able to return.
Many of us have parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who survived or perished in Nazi death marches and we have all grown up in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust.
The state of Israel is currently perpetrating a holocaust, the deliberate mass slaughter of Palestinian people, with weapons provided by the US.
The photos and videos coming out of North Gaza are a terrifying echo of all-too-familiar images of European ghettos and Nazi concentration camps in the 2nd World War.
The Nazi camps were hidden from the world, but as @susanabulhawa writes, “Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and it is doing it in full view of a seemingly indifferent world.”
In observance of the holiday of Sukkot, Jewish students at UCLA erected a Gaza Solidarity Sukkah. They adorned the Sukkah with handmade decorations, photos of anti-Zionist Jewish ancestors, and banners that read “Stop Arming Israel.” They were joined by other students of conscience, members of Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, who gathered to join in prayer and protest.
Then, pro-genocide agitators and UCLA administrators tore their Sukkah down.
First, agitators surrounded the Sukkah and taunted the students with slurs and threats. Then, police in riot gear then arrived to clear the area, allowing agitators to begin tearing down handmade decorations. Finally, facilities workers sent by UCLA admin completed the destruction of this sacred dwelling.
In keeping with Jewish tradition, students intended to eat and sleep in the Sukkah--a ritual in remembrance of Jewish ancestors forced to live in temporary structures in the desert while fleeing slavery. This year, students could not separate their observance from the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in temporary shelters due to the Israeli military's mass destruction of homes in Gaza. Jewish students across the country are observing Sukkot by erecting solidarity Sukkahs dedicated to Gaza and to Palestinian liberation.