Saving Israel and Palestine
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Ralph welcomes Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss what's motivating anti-Palestinian extremism in Israel, how the U.S. has been complicit in Israel's theft of Palestinian territory and genocide against the Palestinian people, and what the United Nations can do to help achieve a lasting peace. Plus, we share Ralph's recent column: "Israeli Leaders’ Objective All Along Has Been the Expulsion of Occupied Palestinians and Seizure of Their Remaining Land." Jeffrrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor (the university’s highest academic rank) and he served as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University from 2002 to 2016. Mr. Sachs has also served in numerous positions at the United Nations, including as President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The reason that diplomacy is not happening is perfectly obvious. Which is that the core of this government does not want diplomacy, even if it were to deliver security. Their aim is not security through diplomacy. Their aim is “Greater Israel.” Jeffrey Sachs I have lived through…watching the U.S. government abandon so many projects, from Southeast Asia through the Americas—these have been terrible projects often—but the U.S. loses interest, it moves on. And Israel needs to actually live in its neighborhood if it's going to survive. And counting on military might to do that is a profound mistake. It's eating away at its own fundamental capacity to act as a society—the idea that you can stand alone in the world community and have no one support you. This is a huge mistake. So I've tried to say to my counterparts in Israel…that this path is not only wrong and immoral, but doomed to fail as well. Jeffrey Sachs The Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates—97 % — in the world. Under dire conditions, they have accomplished farmers, physicians, scientists, engineers, poets, musicians, novelists, artists, and a deep entrepreneurial tradition carried on by the Palestinian diaspora around the world. It is no accident that Israeli bombers directly target Palestinian cultural and educational institutions in their recurrent assaults on Gaza. Israeli militarists have to degrade all Palestinians… to expel them from their ancestral lands. Ralph Nader In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis News 4/10/24 1. An unsettling story in Business Insider recounts how the Israeli military uses an AI system – chillingly called “Where’s Daddy?” – to track Hamas militants to their homes. As one IDF officer put it, “We[‘re] not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they…[are] engaged in a military activity…On the contrary, the IDF bomb[s] them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It's much easier to bomb a family's home.” This policy of bombing family homes “as a first option” is a major factor in why so many Palestinian families have lost unimaginable numbers of relatives in Israeli strikes. IDF officers added “human input in the target identification process…[is] essentially [to] ‘rubber stamp’ the machine's picks after little more than ‘20 seconds’ of consideration — which was largely to double-check the target is male.” 2. As we know from the recent polling on the issue, only 22.5% of Democrats now support military aid to Israel, while 83% want a permanent ceasefire. More surprising is that only 41% of Republicans want  the U.S. to send military aid to Israel, and 58% want a permanent ceasefire. This poll is now joined by a similar poll from the United Kingdom, showing 56% of the British public – including 74% of Labour Party voters – support their government refusing to sell more weapons to Israel, with only 17% in support of continuing such sales. Pressing on this issue, progressive members of Congress Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky have penned a lette
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