How You Can Support Palestine In Central PA
By Teddy
In light of the ongoing fight in Gaza, where Israel has targeted more than 250 hospitals, medical facilities, schools, solar panels and water tanks and whose Security Minister recently gloated their military is “rolling out the Gaza Nakba” (a reference to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian in the area now called Israel in 1948), we are required to step back and see what enables Israel to carry out their Nazi-style attacks on the population — and when we do, we find that we are more than able “from the belly of the beast” itself to fight for Palestine. You can organize, you can boycott and demand sanctions and disinvestment, you can donate, and you can demand your workplace stops producing orders or allows the transport of weapons of destruction.
We also provide analysis below of the more subtle ways the politicians and companies around us are supporting Israel.
Organize!
There are many organizations in Centre County that are worthwhile investigating and joining, volunteering time to support, or even just following to attend a rally here or there. The following are links to organizations in our area. If we are missing any, please reach out to us:
Penn State Students for Justice in Palestine
Student Committee for Defense and Solidarity
People’s Defense Front of Northern Appalachia
Penn State Students for Justice in Palestine have also authored a petition and are asking the public to sign in support. Petition to Penn State Admin: End Financial & Rhetorical Support for Genocide in Palestine
Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanction (BDS)
One way to stand up against Israel is to boycott Israeli companies or US companies complicit in trading with Israel.
Act Now Against These Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People
Another is to demand that governments, universities, institutions and investment funds disinvest from Israel. HB 2107 makes such intentional disinvestments under public pressure illegal in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, knowing the state politicians who supported this measure is worth following for our readers. This is especially the case considering that many of these same ultra-reactionary politicians within state government are hedging all state government employees retirement funds and benefits on Israel through Pennsylvania’s Treasury Department purchasing Israeli bonds to the volume of $56 million. Public employees should discuss this within union meetings and demand disinvestment on a state-wide level, as well as a repeal of HB 2107.
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The targets of demands of disinvestment includes several universities across Pennsylvania who are wrapped in with Israel’s occupation. Though public universities are required to disclose financial decisions, much of Penn State University’s financial statements opaque.
There are many politicians, university presidents, union bosses and investment portfolio directors who are benefiting directly and indirectly from Israel’s genocide.
Such actions also include calls for academic and cultural boycott. This includes “birthright trips” or “cross-cultural exchanges” which are funded by Hillel programs on universities and in temples across Pennsylvania. Such trips are spearheaded with support from officials in the fascist Netanyahu government who cater “potemkin village” experiences within occupied Palestine for young Jewish and non-Jewish teens and young adults, which whitewash Israel’s foundation and its continued occupation.
Donate!
These are shared with the critical note that aid is only trickling in as a result of the blockade, which is not only enforced by Israel but also by the pro-US client state of Al-Sisi in Egypt.
War production in Pennsylvania, and what we can do about it
Pennsylvania, as an industrial state, has several manufacturers that produce for both civilian and military purposes in regards to exports to Israel. This map below features prominent sites of companies that produce military and police weapons for Israel, including both business office branches and actual production sites. This also includes universities who take part or have taken part in technological research for the benefit of weapon manufacturers that work closely with Israel.
Why does the US provide for Israel?
The truth is Israel is a military outpost of US imperialism and the configuration of the Israeli economy is determined by its role as police officer for US imperialist interests — a role they took up numerous times in ways that can’t be covered fully here. It is Israel’s role as a settler colonial state and as enforcer of the US in the region that inspires so much enthusiasm for the Palestinian people and their fight, and not, as some Islamist and corporate media talking pieces claim, because this is a war between Muslims and Jews. Between 1967 and 1986, one-half of Israel’s budget is US aid directly and indirectly through loans and bonds, and today Israel remains the greatest recipient of US aid since World War 2. Israel’s economy is based on war production as the highest proportion of its industrial output, and to be able to continue intervening on Washington’s behalf, they receive patents, technology transfers, the substitution of grants for loans, the exemption from taxation of large donations and other secret forms of funding.
Israel has worked for US imperialists through this support, first in invading Egypt in 1956 over the “Suez Canal war” when the head of Egypt attempted to nationalize the valuable Suez Canal waterway so as to redistribute the profits of it more equitably — instead deposing the plan to do so. Israel has kept the Arab world divided and weak — for example, in the 1950s they threatened an invasion of Jordan in the event of a nationalist military coup. There was the “defensive” attack of 1967 in which Israel defeated Syrian, Egyptian and Jordanian forces, which they later bragged was a “surprise” attack. There was the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s and early 2000s, the bombing of Tripoli, and the downing of a Libyan civilian airliner — the list of state terrorism goes on. Israeli intelligence and military has also offered support globally, arming the Contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola, and the MNR of Mozambique (Apartheid-backed rebels that fought for colonialism), and working closely with Apartheid South Africa in developing a nuclear programme.
The nature of such a set-up requires Israel to act on its role as enforcer consistently — it cannot survive otherwise. Continual war investment results in lower profits and investment in the productive sector over time, leaving it in a state of dependency to the US.
Israel, in other words, is terminally on American life support.
Conclusion
Just as hundreds of thousands of Arabs march across the Middle East, sparking fears among their own reactionary rulers who are complicit in Israel’s actions, and progressive Jewish, Muslims, members of the Palestinian diaspora and all others interested in a Palestine that is free from Israeli aggression and US imperialism have marched in large number in Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and beyond, it is important now more than ever to generalize this anti-imperialist sentiment to all areas of American life that sustain the Israeli genocide machine.
