April Palestine Update

Around the US, pro-Palestine students, organizers, and protesters are being arrested on trumped up immigration charges and other related offenses. From Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University in New York to Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts University in Massachusetts, student after student, teacher after teacher continues to stand up for the people of Palestine in the face of repression by the bourgeois police state. These arrests are being carried out in broad daylight by non uniformed officers.

This violent repression extends to the Cincinnati area as well. A student organizer at University of Cincinnati was arrested by campus police for the “crime” of waving a Palestinian flag in front of white supremacists — who were being protected by said campus police — carrying signs that said “women are property” and “Muslims are terrorists.” As the student was moved from school grounds to the Hamilton County Jail, the UC branches of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) called an emergency protest demanding the student’s release, prompting over a hundred people to show up to the jail in support. Through the collective will of the UC students and a coalition of political organizers, the student was eventually freed.

Internationally, while Syria and Israel attack Lebanon from all sides, Israel is simultaneously conducting air raids and ground strikes in Syria. Israel continues to widen their ever-expanding war on the region, showing little to no interest in working with any state that defies their territorial claims to the whole of the levant. As claims and counterclaims of “terrorist insurgency” and goals of creating a Syrian satellite state abound, the US seems both unable and unwilling to rein in their junior partner in the region and continues to fund the mass destruction and suffering of the people of the levant. As attacks by the IDF in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and more continue to escalate, the people on the ground suffer more and more as access to clean food, drinking water, and medical supplies becomes more and more scarce.

As always, Cincinnati Socialists condemns these atrocities and the agenda of the Israeli regime and their benefactors in the United States and around the world. These mass-murderers have forsaken their collective humanity for theologically motivated genocide of a whole set of people, and they are an embarrassment to the memory of those who suffered and died during the Jewish Holocaust. Their actions towards these atrocities will be laid bare by the vast majority of people who stand on the side of collective liberation!