Dear friends--
I hope you're doing okay? There's a lot to pack into today's newsletter... The situation for Gaza's people is deteriorating rapidly, between air-strikes, repeated displacements, destruction of basic infrastructure, harsh limitations on aid shipments, starvation, and now the rampant spread of diseases including (but not limited to) polio.
Oh, and the whole of West Asia (the "Middle East") is still on tenterhooks as Iran and the Lebanese movement Hizbullah prepare their response to the gross escalation that Israel unleashed against both of them back on the night of July 30-31. (I explored some of the ramifications of that in my appearance on the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday.)
Before I dive into all those issues (and more) I just want to share an observation about the challenge that VP Kamala Harris currently faces, of trying to energize and mobilize a Democratic Party base for the November election at a time when a large chunk of the politically engaged people who could and should form the basis of the Democratic Party's "Get Out the Vote" and other grassroots efforts are very angry indeed about the continuation of Pres. Biden's "ironclad" support for Israel's genocide in Gaza.
VP Harris seems to have made some attempt to address this issue, though thus far with notably mixed success. Her arrogant put-down of anti-genocide protesters at a big midweek rally in (of all places!) Michigan was a serious faux pas, and she seems to have been looking for a less divisive way to respond to the protesters since then. (And yes, these anti-genocide protests will certainly continue among the Democratic Party base, as long as Pres. Biden continues his "ironclad" support of Israel and its genocide.)
But here's a proposal: Kamal Harris is only the VP. She is not the current decisionmaker-- despite some attempts by herself and her campaign managers to present her now as an equal member of the White House's leadership team. She does not make policy. But in her role as the standard-bearer of Democratic Party hopes in this year's election she should now go privately to her boss, Biden, and tell him bluntly that he needs to crack down rapidly on Israel's actions in Gaza, to force PM Netanyahu to agree to a lasting ceasefire in Gaza on the terms that have been under discussion for months, and that this ceasefire agreement needs to be nailed down completely within the coming week.
Yes, I know that Joe Biden is a stubborn old man with a decades-long record of fealty to Zionism. But the stubborn-ness he showed in hanging onto his dreams of staying in this year's presidential election finally got eroded (even if only after an. unconscionably long delay.) The stubborn-ness with which he has continued to support genocidal Israel needs to be confronted, and ended-- very soon indeed! Otherwise, the Democratic Party convention due to start August 19 in (heavily pro-Palestinian) Chicago could turn into a fiasco, and then the weeks between then and the election similarly chaotic.
And if as a result Donald Trump ends up winning the election-- which is a very live possibility-- then the responsibility for that will fall largely on Biden and his continued, slavish support for the génocidaires of Tel Aviv.
Just a thought. I admit that yesterday's news that the U.S. government will be releasing a further $3.5 billion-worth of arms to Israel does not augur well for the prospect that Biden might-- finally-- take the decision to crack down on the PM Netanyahu and end the genocide. But he could still do it. And if he does, that would be the greatest contribution he could possibly make to the success of the Harris-Walz ticket in November.
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Regional uncertainties
Meantime, of course, fears and uncertainty remain high in Israel and among its friends in West Asia regarding the nature and timing of the operations that Iran and Hizbullah will almost certainly launch in reaction to the two highly provocative and escalatory assassinations that the Israeli military undertook in Beirut and Tehran at the end of last month.
 In my appearance on the EI livestream Wednesday, I made a couple of points on that topic. One was that, as the old saying goes, "Revenge is a dish best served cold." In the present case, Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah has openly reveled in the panic that has gripped Israel since July 31.
The currently high tensions in West Asia have clear global dimensions. US Centcom chief Gen. Eric Kurilla has now visited (genocidal) Israel twice this month, no doubt to coordinate the two countries' responses to a range of possible Iranian/Hizbullah actions. And the head of Russia's National Security Council, Gen. Sergei Shoigu, has meantime been in Tehran. Some (mainly Western) reports have indicated that Shoigu's main aim during the visit was to urge "restraint" on the Iranians. Others, including this one on the mainly-business website MENAFN, note that Russia's Pres. Putin has offered to mediate personally between Iran and Israel, and has asked the Iranians to act with restraint while he tries to do so.
Any such high-level mediation by Russia in this matter would have huge global implications.
As it is, ever since December 1973 the United States has arrogated to itself the "right" to monopolize all mediation efforts between Israel and other states and parties in West Asia; and its ability to hang onto that monopoly has been a significant source of the USA's "soft power" within global politics.
On a related note, one of the other points I made in the conversation I had with the friends at EI on Wednesday was that when Israel assassinated Hamas's leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran July 31, that was a major provocation not just against the Palestinians, and not just against Haniyeh's Iranian hosts-- but also against the United States itself, given that for many months now Washington, has been working very hard, at the behest of the Israelis, to try to complete the ceasefire+hostages negotiations regarding Gaza... The prime interlocutor for all those diplomatic efforts, on the Palestinian side, was Haniyeh.
So then the Israelis go to Tehran and snuff him out. What does that say to anyone, anywhere, about the integrity or effectiveness of U.S. mediation efforts?
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Yahya Sinwar-- and our 'Understanding Hamas' book
As you probably already know, back on Monday Hamas's political bureau elected the political head of the movement's Gaza wing to replace Haniyeh as its head. There has been a lot of speculation over the political impact this choice will have. (In my view: not that much, but let us wait and see over time...)
 Meantime, as all these events have been unfolding, we at Just World Ed have been working with all due speed with our partners at OR Books to get our book Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters ready to start printing.
Printing and shipping should start within the next two weeks. Have you ordered your copy yet?
In any attempt to write a book about a "still-moving" subject there is always the dilemma of when to "close" the text. We closed our book on July 26, the date that's recorded on the Introduction that my co-author Rami G. Khouri and I wrote for it. It might feel tempting to try to include in a book like this just one or two subsequent (post-deadline) events... But as I learned when I was writing my book on PLO back in the fraught months of 1982-83, that is a slippery slope indeed! You need a firm "closing date" and you need to stick to it.
So now, we are confident that we have produced a valuable resource that will provide a range of readers-- including both specialists in West Asian affairs and general readers-- with information, documentation, and analytical tools that can help them to understand a broad range of the kinds of events that will involve Hamas over the months and years ahead.
Go to the Understanding Hamas page on the OR website and read some of the endorsements that the book has already won... And place your pre-order now! As I said, the books will be shipping soon.
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Our PalCast with Hana Salah
 We recorded the latest episode of our PalCast podcast on Wednesday, and our guest was Hana Salah, a financial journalist from Gaza who managed to exit the enclave some months ago and is now in Doha. Find this episode at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio from. It's titled “Gaza, Hamas, and Israel: Expanding the War.”
Hana joined the PalCast host Dr. Yousef Aljamal and me (as co-host) to discuss Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, life amidst conflict, and some regional developments. Hana shared how she managed her family's life while reporting during bombings when the struggle for safety and survival is a constant reality for journalists in Gaza. Our discussion also explored recent developments in the broader West Asian region.
Despite the hardships she has suffered, Hana remains passionate about empowering marginalized communities. She works tirelessly to support farmers and women in Gaza’s rural areas. Her commitment to amplifying their voices underscores the resilience of indigenous communities in the face of adversity. Be sure to listen to our discussion!
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Prophetic Bethlehem pastor to speak at NYC's Riverside Church
 In 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to to The Riverside Church in Manhattan's Upper West Side to deliver a powerful speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence,” in which he called on the United States to admit its wrongdoings in Vietnam, atone, and takethe initiative in working towards peace.
On August 14, The Riverside Church will be hosting Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a profound Palestinian Christian voice from Bethlehem who recently went viral for his Christmas sermon, “Christ in the Rubble.” Dr. Isaac will address the impacts of the silence (and often, complicity) with which American churches have greeted the ongoing apartheid and genocide in the West Bank and Gaza. His talk will be titled "Silence Is Complicity", and will start at 7:00 pm. (Doors open 6:00 pm.)
Learn more details and buy your tickets here.
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More on Israel's torture of Palestinian detainees
In last week's newsletter I wrote some about the report (PDF) that the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk had just released into the often horrifying tortures that Israeli military and prison authorities had enacted on the many thousands of Palestinian detainees it has seized and held since last October 7. Shortly after writing that newsletter, I codified some of the thoughts I had expressed there about the whole matter of torture and what it tells us about the disintegration of Israeli society into this post on my Globalities blog.
 Over the past week, many more, and more disturbing, details have come out about the widespread and institutionalized nature of the gross sexual and other forms of abuse that Israeli military and prison authorities have visited on Palestinian detainees. Several news outlets published grainy CCTV footage (e.g. here) from the large hall in the Sde Teiman military base in which around 40 men are seen lying bound and hooded on the floor, at the point when four armed guards and a dog step forward to pull one man to his feet and drag him over to a corner in which four or so other guards have attempted to make a visual barrier with their shields... behind which the guards are then seen apparently abusing the prisoner in a very gross sexual way.
This may have been the prisoner who was later taken to a medical facility with ruptured bowels and even serious lung damage from the assault he suffered.
That prisoner later reportedly died from the very extreme act of sodomy, and his case may (or may not) have been the one that, reported by an Israeli physician, was later referred to in Israeli media and also in the UNHCHR report... and then to have spurred the attempt by Israel's military police to "investigate" the guards in question. At which point, as we know, many rightwing figures in Israel became very mobilized in the "right to rape" movement that supported the rapists and tried to force the Israeli military high command to halt the investigations.
On Wednesday, those protesters even disrupted a hearing the Israeli Supreme Court was trying to hold into the rape incident.
Twenty-plus years ago I did a lot of research into the gross cruelty enacted by participants in Rwanda's genocide of 1994. There are many ways of trying to understand how the appetite for such extreme cruelty can grip entire, sizeable populations, and I still don't have a full answer. Israeli-born activist Jonathan Ofir recently tried to give his explanation of what's been happening in Israeli society on this score, here.
But one of the things that struck me when I forced myself to watch and rewatch the CCTV footage from Sde Teiman was the degree to which the actions of the eight or so guards involved in perpetrating (and hiding) that act of sodomy seemed very calm, so effortlessly choreographed that it clearly looked like a serious of actions that those eight men had taken a number of times before and had become routine for them. They had no need to run around from one position to another or to gesticulate that "we need to go over there", or to reposition some of their comrades for optimal effectiveness. No, clearly they had done this before, perhaps many times; and they simply went about their business and did it.
Another notable resource on torture in Israel's prison camps that came out this week is this report (PDF) that the Israeli human-rights org B'tselem issued, titled "Welcome to Hell." Here is just one key excerpt from their report:
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B'tselem's report is certainly disturbing. I note, though, that most of the survivor testimonies they have been able to include have been from some of the thousands of West Bank Palestinians caught up in Israel's widespread campaigns of detention; and they have very few testimonies from the greater number of Gazans seized, who have almost certainly been subjected to even worse treatment than their compatriots from the West Bank.
Disease and starvation as part of the genocide
There have been increasing numbers of reports about the wide spread of skin diseases among a Gaza-Palestinian population that has little access to clean water, adequate nutrition, or even basic or stable shelter from the hot sun of a Gaza summer.
 One of the best of the reports on the skin diseases is this one by Wafaa Shurafa and Mohammed Jahjouh, which appeared in The Independent on July 30. The title says a lot: "Palestinian children plagued by lice, scabies and rashes in Gaza’s overcrowded tent camps." ...But the whole report is worth reading.
And polio...
And deliberate starvation:
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Just looking at the UN-OCHA's "trucks-per-day" numbers there it seems clear that, for a few weeks immediately after the Israeli military's targeted killing of the seven aid workers from World Cebntral Kitchen back on April 1, the arm of the Israeli military that controls all the borders into Gaza-- known as COGAT-- did allow a modest increase in the number of trucks/day going into Gaza. From 139 trucks/day in March to 169 in April. But after April, that number slumped back to less than 100, where it has stayed since.
And all this time, Pres. Biden and his flacks have been assuring us that (a) he was putting a "lot of pressure" on Israel to force them to increase aid shipments, while (b) he was just "on the brink" of nailing down the full cease+hostages agreement.
What a duplicitous fraud he is. I hope that someone in the White House or in VP Harris's campaign can get to him and "persuade" him to use all the power he has (which is considerable!) to end this genocide completely, and immediately.
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So now, a tiny bit of relatively good news for you (though "news" that also has its poignant side.)
 As you may know, earlier this year I devoted a lot of time to efforts to sell the foreign rights to the two books that my company Just World Books had published, that had been edited (or co-edited) by our friend the beloved Gaza-Palestinian literature teacher Dr. Refaat Alareer... who was brutally assassinated by the Israelis, along with six family members, back in December.
Several of the foreign-language publishers to whom I was able to sell the rights to Refaat's books are now bringing their versions of his works to their publics. Hurrah! His work lives on! One of these pubishers is Takween Publishing of Kuwait, which this week sent me the cover art for their version of Refaat's short-story anthology, Gaza Writes Back. I love the way they titled it: Ghazza tuqawim bil-kitaba ("Gaza resists through its writing") which exactly captured Refaat's intent.
I'll share more details of other foreign rights to Refaat's book in weeks to come. And later this year, JWB will be issuing our own new Memorial Edition of Gaza Writes Back... stay tuned.
Meantime, you stay sane, stay well, and stay active--
Helena
P.S. And yes, we are still super-grateful to all our friends who support Just World Ed's work with their (your) donations. If you haven't done so recently, please click on the green button below. And if you want to catch up with some of Just World Books's fab and tragically timely books from Gaza, then scroll on down and click on the photo-montage there...
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