As @latimes reports, Google's retaliation against Ariel began when she criticized @Google and @Amazon's Project Nimbus contract and called on both companies to stop providing services to the Israeli government and military.
BREAKING: In leaked internal memo, @ADL admits its police exchange programs between the US and Israel might militarize police and contribute to police violence.
@ADL “paused” the programs after pressure by Black, Palestinian, and Jewish orgs.
Our collective power in action.
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Since 2004, @ADL has taken US law enforcement officers to train in Israel. On these trips, US officers learned to treat marginalized people in the US the way Israeli forces treat Palestinians: with racist, militarized tactics developed through occupation and apartheid rule.
For example, a California sheriff interviewed by the @guardian said the systems and tactics he learned on his @ADL training in Israel were “Hollywood-esque” and “more invasive.”
Israeli officers’ use of force “shocked” him: “We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.”
Last year, 2,000+ @Google and @amazon workers demanded an end to their companies' Israeli contracts. The contracts’ cloud services can help the Israeli government and military surveil Palestinians, expand illegal settlements, and inflict violence on Palestinians under occupation.
Ariel Koren, an anti-Zionist Jew, was one of the 2,000 @Google and @amazon workers who came out against Project Nimbus.
And now Google is punishing her for speaking up about how its contract with Israel violates Palestinian human rights.
The Sierra Club, the preeminent conservation org, was set to lead a nature trip to Israel today with no mention of Palestinians. So a coalition of Palestinian, Indigenous, Black and Jewish partners demanded they cancel trips that would greenwash apartheid. Weeks later, they did!
Israeli forces routinely expel Palestinians from their land and then cover the ruins with a park or preserve. This ethnic cleansing has dire impacts on the environment too: Israel has uprooted over 800,000 native olive trees – now only 11% of the trees on the land are indigenous.
We know the Zionist playbook all too well – so its no surprise that Sierra Club is being hit hard with backlash right now, with the classic players calling the decision antisemitic and demanding a public apology to Jewish people.
The Israeli govt is settling Jewish Ukrainian refugees on land it illegally occupies and prevents 7 million Palestinian refugees from returning to.
Refugees have the right to sanctuary — AND the right to return home.
Pitting refugees against each other is not justice.
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Many JVP members or our ancestors were refugees ourselves, fleeing war, persecution, or genocide (including in Ukraine).
But we came to view Zionism — Jewish settlement in Palestine requiring forced displacement of natives — as a misguided and harmful approach to Jewish safety.
As with many previous waves of European Jewish refugees who escaped to Palestine since Zionism began, Jewish Ukrainians will leave downtrodden and dispossessed but arrive as settlers, with the privileges given to the dominant demographic in a settler-colonial apartheid state.
Some bombing images purported to be from Ukraine are actually from Palestine.
If these images are moving us to action and sympathy for Ukraine — and provoking the US to impose aggressive sanctions on Russia — they should do the same for Palestine and Israel, respectively.
While Israeli violence in Gaza is directly funded by the US government to the tune of $3.8 billion per year, the US refuses to withdraw this funding and impose the kind of sanctions it has so readily vowed to impose on Russia.
Sheikh Jarrah needs your solidarity NOW just as much as May 2021 when millions of us took to our streets and keyboards to support Palestinians defending their homes against Israeli ethnic cleansing.
Listen to Muna El-Kurd’s call to amplify their struggle #SaveSheikhJarrah
As we speak, hundreds of settlers are descending on Sheikh Jarrah for the 6th night in a row in a violent campaign to remove the Salem family from their home, with the assistance of Israeli forces. This is what we were resisting last May — exactly what we were trying to prevent.
The Israeli government and settlers are counting on us to look away, to burn out, to let our attention and dedication to solidarity falter. They saw — and were threatened by — the impact of our posts and protests, and they are hoping that we won’t bring that energy now.