By 21 March, Cuba had sent healthcare professionals to 37 countries to collaborate in combating the pandemic. Italy received 53 Cuban medics who had previously worked in West Africa during the deadly Ebola outbreak of 2014. Cuba also stepped into the breach in mid-March when a cruise ship with over 600 mostly British passengers and a handful of Covid-19 cases were left stranded for a week after the US and neighbouring countries denied them permission to dock. Cuba let them in, treated the sick and assisted their transfer on to flights home. Thus, Cuba is taking a leading role in tackling this global pandemic. Just how can a small, Caribbean island, underdeveloped by centuries of colonialism and imperialism, and subject to punitive, extra-territorial sanctions by the United States for 60 years, have so much to offer the world?
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, capitalist governments have adopted emergency powers, introduced as ‘a last resort’ in societies where neoliberalism has put down deep economic and ideological roots. For decades we have been told that only the free market ensures efficiency. Now this global health crisis brings the very concept into question. The Cuban contribution demonstrates that a socialist state can achieve efficient outcomes, measured by societal need, not private profit.
After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the revolutionary government developed a free, universal healthcare system, attaining more doctors per person than any other country in the world. This has been facilitated by free, universal access to education at all levels. The benefits are distributed globally; some 400,000 Cuban medical professionals have worked overseas in six decades, mainly in poor countries, providing healthcare that is free at the point of delivery.
Cuba is recognised globally both for its infectious disease controls and disaster risk reduction, usually in response to climate-related and natural disasters. These experiences are being harnessed to combat Covid-19. The Cuban healthcare system seeks prevention over cure, with a network of family doctors who are responsible for community health and live among their patients. To combat the outbreak, healthcare personnel are conducting door-to-door health checks, testing, contact tracing, quarantining, establishing a registry of those with underlying health conditions who may need additional attention. This is accompanied by public education campaigns and daily update s through a new app covid-19-
InfoCu on Infomed, the country’s public health internet platform. By 22 March, Cuba had 35 confirmed cases of Covid-19, one fatality, and nearly 1,000 patients under observation in hospital, around one-third of them foreigners and over 30,000 people under surveillance at home. On 23 March, Cuba closed its borders to all non-resident foreigners in order to control the outbreak, a tough decision given the importance of tourism revenue to the state.
The work of Cuban medical scientists with interferons in the early 1980s catalysed the early and distinctive development of their biotechnology industry. As a result of Fidel Castro’s vision and collaboration with medical scientists in the US and Europe, Cuba first made and used interferons to arrest a deadly outbreak of the dengue virus in 1981.* ‘We have taken Interferon as a model for the development of biotechnology in our country’, announced Dr Luis Herrera in 1986. Interferon Alfa 2b was being developed by capitalist big pharma, however, while their products shared a common active ingredient, the Cuban formulation (components) is distinct and, in that sense, Cuban Interferon Alfa 2b is a unique product. The Cubans were also the first to use the drug as part of a mass anti-viral public health Campaign.
The biotech sector was launched in the United States with venture capital. The world’s first biotechnology enterprise, Genetech, was founded in San Francisco in 1976, followed by AMGen in Los Angeles in 1980. Internationally, the biotech sector did not achieve profits from product sales until 2009. Nonetheless, billions of dollars poured into the industry. Why does money from venture capital and big pharma flow into an industry in which profits are so hard to come by? The answer is the role of financial mechanisms such as Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), Special Purpose Entities (SPEs), Special Purpose Corporations (SPCs), and patents licences, in permitting profits to be made from a high-tech sector with low productivity. Start-up firms typically depend on venture capital investment to underwrite their initial costs. Once some promising products are developed, venture capitalists and other early-stage investors seek to recoup their investment by having the firm issue stock to the public in an IPO.
Biotech companies will only undertake research in products for which a profitable market is deemed to exist, and their development and use will be abandoned if that profit does not materialise, they lose the support of investors, or stock prices fall, and so on. Biotechnology products can take up to 20 years to commercialise, and many will never reach that point. By 2002, only about 100 biotech-related drugs had reached the market, with the top ten accounting for nearly all sales. Virtually all biopharma companies that do IPOs are productless. However, financial speculation permits stock-market investors to reap huge rewards by trading biopharma stock even in the absence of a commercial product.
Furthermore, public investment underlies this private profit. The US government gives huge financial, legislative and regulatory support to the sector. Two researchers on the topic conclude: ‘The biopharmaceutical industry has become big business because of big government [and] remains highly dependent on big government to sustain its commercial success.’ Between 1978 and 2004, the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent $365 billion on life sciences. Commodification of publicly funded medical research has been legalised. Regulatory assistance is channelled through US patent policy, the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) approval process and decisions concerning what drugs or therapies to include on national health care programmes.
Thus, the Cuban biotech industry is not exceptional just because it receives government support and public funding. It is exceptional because of the political economy of Cuba; its centrally planned, state-controlled economy, and a development strategy which has prioritised healthcare, education, and research into science and technology from the early 1960s.
Furthermore, public investment underlies this private profit. The US government gives huge financial, legislative and regulatory support to the sector. Two researchers on the topic conclude: ‘The biopharmaceutical industry has become big business because of big government [and] remains highly dependent on big government to sustain its commercial success.’ Between 1978 and 2004, the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent $365 billion on life sciences. Commodification of publicly funded medical research has been legalised. Regulatory assistance is channelled through US patent policy, the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) approval process and decisions concerning what drugs or therapies to include on national health care programmes.
Thus, the Cuban biotech industry is not exceptional just because it receives government support and public funding. It is exceptional because of the political economy of Cuba; its centrally planned, state-controlled economy, and a development strategy which has prioritised healthcare, education, and research into science and technology from the early 1960s.
In 1981, the Biological Front, a professional interdisciplinary forum, was set up to develop the biotech industry in Cuba, just five years after Genentech in the US. While most developing countries had little access to the new technologies (recombinant DNA, human gene therapy, biosafety), Cuban biotechnology expanded and took on an increasingly strategic role in both the public health sector and the national economic development plan. It did so despite the US blockade obstructing access to technologies, equipment, materials, finance and even knowledge exchange.
Founded solely through state investment, with financing guaranteed through the state budget, the Cuban biopharma sector is state owned, with no private interests or speculative investments. ‘Our shareholders are all 11 million Cubans!’, Agustín Lage Dávila, Director for the Centre for Molecular Immunology replied to the head of a multinational pharmaceutical company who told him how many investors they had. Cuban biopharma is driven by public health demand, profit is not sought domestically because the sector is completely integrated with the state healthcare system. The sector has been characterised by the fast track from research and innovation to trials and application. Medicines that Cuba cannot afford or cannot get access to because of the US blockade have to be produced domestically. Today, nearly 70% of the medicines utilised in Cuba are produced domestically.
Cooperation prevails over competition as research and innovations are shared between different institutions. Teams of scientists are established to take a project through from basic science, to product-oriented research, to manufacturing and marketing; activities that are carried out by different businesses in most countries. Dr Kelvin Lee, Director of Immunology at the Roswell’s Park Cancer Institute in New York highlights these ‘striking’ and ‘unique’ characteristics of the Cuban biotech sector: ‘They start with identifying a need, then figure out the science to develop that in the lab, manufacture their agent, test it in the Cuban medical system and then commercialise it and sell it overseas.’ Under a licence issued by former US President Obama, Roswell Park is conducting clinical trials on CIMAVax-EGF, Cuba’s innovative lung cancer vaccine. By contrast, in capitalist countries, Dr Lee explains, typically a small start-up is established to investigate the science behind a ‘great idea’. It is subsequently bought out by a larger company, sometimes twice, which might decide ‘well, you developed this drug for a really rare disease but we’re going to use it to treat lung cancer’, and subsequently ‘it really bombs and a great idea disappears’. The disadvantage the Cubans face, he adds, is that they can’t pursue thousands of good ideas and write off those which don’t work as sunk costs. ‘They don’t have the resources to do that’. Their access to capital is extremely limited. To compensate for that, he says: ‘They are very thoughtful, thorough planners.'
What have been the fruits of this distinctive Cuban system? Cuban professionals have received ten gold medals from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) over 26 years. The first was in 1989 for the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine; another was for the Haemophilus influenza type b (Hib) vaccine, another for Heberprot-P for diabetic foot ulcers which affect some 422 million people worldwide. The treatment reduces the need for amputations by 71% and in ten years 71,000 Cubans and 130,000 people in 26 other countries received the treatment. Another WIPO award was for Itolizumab, for treating psoriasis, also benefitting over 100,000 people worldwide.
In 2015, the World Health Organization announced that Cuba was first in the world to eliminate mother-to-child HIV transmission. Cuba has prevented an AIDS epidemic with domestically produced antiretroviral medicine that halts patient transmission. Cuba’s mortality curve for AIDS continues to fall. The universal use of the CIGB’s hepatitis B vaccine on newborns means Cuba should be among the first countries free from Hepatitis B. This is one of the eight vaccines (out of 11 vaccines for 13 diseases) administered to Cuban children which are produced in Havana’s Science City. Within ten years, 100 million doses of Cuba’s Hep B vaccine were used around the world.
Cuba achieved a complete congenital hypothyroidism screening programme before the US. Cuba’s Immunoassay Centre developed its own Ultramicroanalytic System (SUMA) equipment for prenatal diagnosis for congenital anomalies. In 2017, the Immunoassay Centre produced 57 million tests per year for 19 different conditions. Cuba’s Centre for Neuroscience is developing cognitive and biomarker tests for early screening of Alzheimer’s disease.
The Cuban biotech sector has nearly 200 inventions and products marketed in 49 countries, with the capacity for large-scale production of Cuban and generic drugs for export cheaply to developing countries, and partnerships in nine countries in the global south. The difference between Cuba’s state owned and public-health orientated biotech industry, and the speculative profit-seeking of capitalist firms, has been exposed by the global pandemic. Cuba provides a lesson for us all.
Which does not comes as a surprise to those who visited the Cuban Institute for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) as part of the 50th Anniversary Venceremos Brigade were impressed by the many scientific advances that the Institute had achieved, including the development of interferons to successfully fight viral diseases such as dengue and ebola. Little did the journalists imagine in 2019 that in another seven months Cuba's unique Alpha 2-B recombinant interferon (IFNrec) would become one of the first-line anti-viral drugs used in China and in other countries around the world to fight the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Cuba’s development of this vital interferon is now being widely recognized even in mainstream U.S. publications such as Newsweek. Its scientific and medical advances are breaking through the U.S. disinformation blockade which routinely is able to suppress or distort all reference to Cuban accomplishments. In a recent webinar, the Cuban ambassador to the U.S. , José Ramón Cabañas and other medical experts explained that IFNrec is not a cure for COVID-19, but preliminary reports are promising, pointing to IFNrec’s efficacy (in combination with other drugs) in treating COVID-19. Over 45 countries around the world have asked Cuba for this important drug, but at this point it isn’t available in the U.S. U.S. and Canadian organizers have begun a campaign to call for the incorporation of IFNrec into U.S. and Canadian clinical trials and for the U.S. FDA to approve it for use in the U.S.
U.S. media has also had to grudgingly acknowledge the impressive medical brigades that Cuba has sent to over 20 countries, offering medical and public health expertise to Italy, Haiti, Jamaica, Angola, South Africa and many others. Over 1200 Cuban medical personnel are directly involved in the fight against COVID-19 and many are part of the specially trained Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade which is named after an American who fought in the first Cuban war of independence, 1868-1878, against Spanish colonialism. The Henry Reeve Brigade was formed in 2005 partly in response Hurricane Katrina, although Cuba’s offer to send medical personnel to help in New Orleans was rejected by President Bush.
The U.S. government has tried to defame Cuba’s medical solidarity by claiming that it is done only for financial gain. Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Parrilla tweeted in response to the latest allegations, “Unfortunately, while Covid-19 threatens humanity, the U.S. government is hindering the combat of the epidemic by attacking countries that practice solidarity and international cooperation instead of ending the illegal system of unilateral coercive measures, such as the blockade vs Cuba.” On March 31st a plane of medical supplies from China, including masks, diagnostic kits and ventilators, was unable to land in Cuba due to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, a law which seriously escalated the provisions of the U.S. government’s blockade of Cuba which has been in place since 1960.
On April 16th the Cuban Foreign Ministry issued an urgent call for cooperation and solidarity among nations, summarizing Cuba’s response to the crisis in the context of the global political economy “The pandemic has emerged and spread amidst a scenario previously marked by overwhelming economic and social inequalities within and among nations.” Unless developing countries are guaranteed access to vital medical/pharmaceutical technologies and neoliberal coercive economic measures are lifted by the U.S. and other countries, there will be no way to “respond to the economic and social disparities that, even without a pandemic, kill millions of people every year, including children, women and elders.”
Despite the merciless U.S. blockade which keeps Cuba from importing medical supplies and other vital resources, Cuba is using the many strengths of its renowned, free public health care system to fight COVID-19 on the island. Cuba has the world’s highest ratio of physicians to population which gives it a great advantage in battling the pandemic. 28,000 medical students, under the supervision of a professor, are going door-to-door around the country, inquiring as to whether anyone has respiratory symptoms. If there are symptoms the person is immediately sent to a family doctor in the area and if warranted to a local hospital for testing. As Susana Hurlich, a Canadian who has lived in Cuba for thirty years, explains the logic behind Cuba’s fight against COVID-19 is to “educate and mobilize the people around principles of discipline, cooperation and solidarity, and keep them constantly informed so that they can be active and responsible participants in the fight against coronavirus.”
A recent article in New York City’s Indypendent paper, highlighted how a Cuban-trained, American doctor is putting her training into practice in the South Bronx community where she currently works. Dr. Melissa Barber studied at ELAM, the Latin American School of Medicine which provides scholarships to people in the U.S. who commit to using their M.D. degrees to work in underserved communities. Dr. Barber explains how her education in Cuba provided the basis for the community organizing approach that she is now using to fight COVID-19 in coalition with other groups. “Anyone who has been trained in the Cuban health system knows how to assess a community’s health and in emergency situations survey what’s going on….One of the biggest ideas that came from the Cuban Revolution was that everyone, as a human right, should have access to healthcare and should have access to education.”
But when Bernie Sanders dared to recognize Cuban accomplishments in literacy and health on 60 minutes in February, the backlash was immediate and intense, not only from Republicans but from many sectors of the Democratic Party who accused him of praising an “authoritarian regime.” The demonization of Cuba as authoritarian and anti-democratic is a truism in American politics that no one dares challenge. This skewed characterization goes hand-in-hand with the stated goals of the blockade to move Cuba towards American-style “democratization.
This narrative unfortunately has a pervasive influence on progressive perspectives far beyond the Democratic Party. Cuba’s accomplishments in health, education and the environment, plus their commitment to international solidarity may be acknowledged but they are usually carved out as exceptions to what are considered the endemic problems with Cuba’s political system. There is little examination or in-depth study of the Cuban model of popular democracy which was developed from the beginning of the revolution as an alternative to representative democracy. Cubans believed that representative democracy as developed by capitalist countries was designed to serve the needs of corporations, the wealthy and international capital – not the needs of the people. They set about to create an alternative approach that could better reflect the revolutionary socialist project. The Cuban model is continually developing and subject to ongoing examination within Cuba. The recent adoption of a new Cuban constitution in 2019 based on extensive popular consultation is a case in point.
Arundhati Roy recently wrote “Historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Many of us hope that the pandemic could present an opportunity for social transformation if we can collectively figure out the way forward. We want to build on the generative expressions of mutual aid and solidarity that are blossoming in direct opposition to the exploitative structures of race, class, gender and empire that are laid bare in all their brutality by the pandemic.
This is the moment to ground our vision of transformative change by learning from the experiences of Cuba. For decades, Cuba has proven its capacity to implement mutual aid and solidarity within their country and internationally. Cuba’s system is not perfect, Cubans would be the first to agree. And Cuba doesn’t offer a blueprint for work that needs to be done inside the U.S. now. But Cuba provides a history and current practice that we in progressive and left movements need to study carefully. Sixty years of sustained struggle to build a new society, just ninety miles away from the continental United States, can certainly teach us a lot.
It is also a time when we need to vigorously defend Cuba against escalating economic, political and social attacks by the Trump administration. We have a critical responsibility to fight for an end to the U.S. criminal blockade of Cuba, including all economic and travel sanctions. We need to demand that the U.S. stop undermining Cuba’s global medical assistance program. We should call on the FDA to expedite approval of Interferon Alpha 2B recombinant and include it in U.S. clinical trials.
On March 20th, President Miguel Diaz-Canel described the strengths which Cuba brings to the fight against the pandemic “We have an educated, informed, responsible, compassionate, and disciplined people….In addition to these strengths, we have the training of more than 60 years of a long journey of resistance in the tough wars of all kinds that they have imposed on us. . . . Be strong, Cuba, we will live and we will overcome!”
Enquanto isso, na França, falta máscara, falta ácoolgel, falta teste, e sobram mentiras.
Entre-temps, en France, on manque de masques, d'hydrogel, de tests, et les mensonges abondent.
Inside Story: What's behind global shortage supplies
PALESTINA
Not unlike Christ’s times when Pharisees and Sadducees shrieked their hateful rhetoric, today’s Easter celebrations in Palestine are marred by Zionist hatred, apartheid, vengeance, brutality, corruption, militarism, a rabidly virulent racism, and a lethal virus called Israeli occupation.
In the face of repeated Israeli assaults on Palestinians and their rich cultural heritage, familial, communal, and national traditions and customs have been the glue that has held the fabric of Palestinian society together; it is precisely these bonds that have maintained the fragile framework of cohesiveness; they have also been an important factor in preventing societal disintegration. To face adversities and heinous apartheid policies imposed by their brutal occupiers, Palestinians exercise Sumood (stoic resilience), and they are determined to hold onto and pass their rich heritage to their children and grandchildren.
The day-to-day living of every Palestinian is punctuated with the daily struggles to forget, and to get on with life – on the one hand – and to remember and advocate on behalf of justice for Palestine and her oppressed children – on the other. Simply put, politics and the cry for justice are the Sisyphean burden inflicted on every Palestinian, no matter where she or he lives.
By recording childhood narratives of Easters in Palestine, I aim to present a testimonial to its rich heritage and record some experiences under Israeli Occupation.
1. "Following the Julian calendar, Orthodox Easter is celebrated anywhere from 10 days to a fortnight after its counterparts in the West celebrate theirs. My family celebrated Easter in the Antiochian and Greek Orthodox traditions. Traditionally, Palm Sunday launches this Holy week. Dressed in their Sunday best, children, carrying their Shȃ’neené (palm fronds), accompany their parents to church. For this special occasion grandfathers, fathers, or older siblings spend hours fashioning the Shȃ’neenés into works of art which include designs in a variety of cruciform expressions, often with white ribbons, white lilies, or motifs and images drawing on a rich tradition of Byzantine iconographic imagery. In the old city, the faithful would line up and participate in processions, often listening to homilies and often participating in the singing of liturgy in a variety of denominational traditional expressions and melodic articulations. Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, the occasional Aramaic, Greek, Russian, Latin, Spanish, and French choral descants filled the air.
On Juma’a (Ar. for Friday) al Hazeené (Ar. for sorrowful/mournful/grief stricken) people fasted and attended services throughout the day; some would wear sepulchral colored clothing as an expression of mourning; theaters would shut down, and festivities would be held to nil. All in all, this was a time for reflection, prayer, and a time when good deeds were undertaken to help the widows, orphans, the needy, the shut-ins and the sick.
An oft repeated narrative from the treasure trove of memories from my childhood and adolescent years crops up during the Easter season. And now that I have been living in diaspora for the past 61 years, these nostalgic memories resurrect themselves in a fusion of pleasant yet unpleasant, joyful yet sorrowful, and pleasurable yet excruciatingly painful recollections and nostalgic reminiscences."
Since 1967, the year Israel completed its stealth of the rest of Palestine, the Israeli government has progressively curbed Easter and Christmas festivities for Palestinian Christians as well as Palestinian Muslims during the feasts of Ramadan and Eid.
While foreign tourists are allowed to freely roam the streets of Jerusalem and have free access to all the Holy Shrines, Palestinians are routinely denied access to hospitals, schools, universities, places of employment and public spaces. Having lived on their ancestral lands for centuries, and to attend special religious services in churches and mosques, today Palestinians are required to apply for permits months in advance, permits that are routinely denied.
Nobody tells you that the only democracy in the Middle East denies Palestinians access to their churches, mosques, streets, towns, villages, parks, mountains, valleys, the Mediterranean Sea, the Jordan River, their farms, vineyards and so much more.
And the reason? Foreign tourists spend dollars, Euros, and other currencies to help boost the Israeli economy. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are an undesirable impediment in Israel’s grand masterplan of having an ethnically pure country where Jews live and rule supreme.
Wrapped up in their self-centered defense of “Our way of life” and living the good life (with a 45% citizenry trying to Make America Great [HATE] Again), most Americans and Europeans are incapable of comprehending the misery their governments have visited on Palestine and her destitute people, including the miseries visited on Asian, African, and Latin America masses who are brutalized by their leaders and exploited for their natural resources to sustain the West’s Way of Life.
Wrapped up in their distorted belief that modern day Jews are God’s Chosen (a view held by Zionist Evangelical Christians, especially of the Hagee, Huckabee, et. al. stripe), and peddling the notion that “The world owes us for the transgressions of the Holocaust,” I don’t expect the vast majority of Israelis and their Zionist abettors around the world to comprehend what successive Israeli governments have done to pulverize Palestine and her people into occupation, subjugation, and anonymity. Israel’s commission of crimes against Palestine and generations of her children is akin to a nasty and deliberately infused perpetual lethal virus with a known antidote/vaccine. Justice, the only corrective cure for the Palestinian/Israel imbroglio, is under lock and key in the Israeli Parliament, and their servile and successive Compliant U.S. Administrations/Congresses and their European lackeys.
"Lest I be accused of being a Holocaust denier and for the record, what dastardly crimes Christian Germany perpetrated on Europe’s Jews are unforgivable. Likewise, what happened to the Armenians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Iraqis, Syrians, Algerians, Congolese, Yemenis, Ugandans, South Africans, Latinos, Rwandans, Native Americans and Palestinians, to name but a very few, is equally abhorrent. While the Holocaust Industry (a phrase coined by “self-hating” Jew Norman Finklestein, the son of Holocaust survivors), assures that Hollywood, the television industry, documentaries, educational institutions, literary works, the media in all its forms, and myriad other venues keep hammering the reprehensible policies of Nazi Germany into the mental body collective. Yet one hears precious little about the aforementioned genocidal atrocities committed by Israel, the United States, and its European allies.
And for this reason my quibble with Jewish Zionists is this: How can you, who’ve suffered so much, inflict such misery on a Palestinian population innocent of Europe’s barbarism? How can you cry wolf when your leaders are perpetrating Nazi brutalities on women, children, and the aged? How can you, who’ve received tens of billions of dollars in reparations, steal everything from Palestinians – their homes and possessions, their lands, their resources, their olive and fruit trees, their orange and citrus groves, and, above all, their identity, dignity and self-respect.
To the Zionist Jews, I hope that during this Passover season you will look in the proverbial mirror of human accountability and stop your denial of the tragedy called Palestinian dispossession and diaspora, a tragedy you created in 1948, and a tragedy that has become an endemically virulent virus chiseling away at was once a peaceful and beautiful country that for eons has been violated by covetous invaders."
Since the year 2000, over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in wholesale slaughters in Gaza and the West Bank. This includes women, children, and innocent civilians whose only crime was to have been Palestinian. Will Israelis and their supporters around the world stop during this Passover celebration, even for a brief moment, to say a prayer of atonement for their continued crimes? Will the Israelis and their supporters around the world demand that the siege of Gaza and the West Bank be lifted during this, the season of a plague named Corona? Or, will they let them suffer and die a slow and excruciating death?
Palestine’s population in the West Bank and Gaza is over 5 million people. As previously stated, since the year 2000, over 10,000 Palestinians have been brutally murdered by Israel’s army and settlers, funded exclusively with hard earned U.S. tax dollars. To extrapolate, that means that between the year 2000 and 2020, 660,00 American citizens would have been murdered.
Would the world have allowed such a genocide?
Only Recently Phillip Weiss (yet another “self-hating Jew”), editor of the remarkable Mondoweiss digital blog, exhibited his moral fortitude in a report under the title “During the Coronavirus crisis, Israel confiscates tents designed for clinic in Northern West Bank”: B’Tselem 26 Mar — This morning, Thursday, 26 March 2020, at around 7:30 am, officials from Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank arrived with a military jeep escort, a bulldozer and two flatbed trucks with cranes at the Palestinian community of Khirbet Ibziq in the northern Jordan Valley. They confiscated poles and sheeting that were meant to form eight tents, two for a field clinic, and four for emergency housing for residents evacuated from their homes, and two as makeshift mosques. The force also confiscated a tin shack in place for more than two years, as well as a power generator and sacks of sand and cement. Four pallets of cinder blocks intended for the tent floors were taken away and four others demolished.
As the whole world battles an unprecedented and paralyzing healthcare crisis, Israel’s military is devoting time and resources to harassing the most vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank that Israel has attempted to drive out of the area for decades. Shutting down a first-aid community initiative during a health crisis is an especially cruel example of the regular abuse inflicted on these communities, and it goes against basic human and humanitarian principles during an emergency. Unlike Israel’s policies, this pandemic does not discriminate based on nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is high time the government and military acknowledged that now, of all times, Israel is responsible for the health and wellbeing of the five million Palestinians who live under its control in the Occupied Territories.
While last week there was a great outpouring of genuine concern for the Covid19-stricken Bronx Zoo tiger, there has not been a single report by any major news outlets on the Corona outbreak in Gaza (and the West Bank), an enclave with the highest population density in the world, a hermetically sealed open-air prison that has been under lockdown for the past 13 years. Gaza is some 18 miles in length and 12 miles in width. Gaza’s 2 million population has only 62 respirators, and 2300 hospital beds to fight this plague. And even though the strip is a Covid19 petri dish, Israel has refused to allow medical supplies from coming in.
What Germany was to death camps, Israel is to a Gaza death camp in the making.
Pray, tell, where is the moral outrage?
"Sitting on the large raised concrete patio in my grandfather’s house, Tata Maria, my paternal grandmother’s sister, would tell us about the Easter celebrations in Palestine.
Maria and her husband owned a small souvenir shop in one of the narrow, cobbled pedestrian-only streets inside Jerusalem’s Old City. She’d often mention that the cobbles of these streets were a witness to the many feet that traversed them on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulture, Golgotha, The Mosque of Omar, the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Via de La Rosa, The Room of the Last Supper (Upper Room) and the many Jerusalem landmarks.
She noted that of all the pilgrims who descended on Palestine’s Jerusalem Easter celebration, the Russian pilgrims, dressed in conservative drably somber dark attire, appeared to be the most devout. The Europeans, especially the French, were the loudest, the Brits cold and distant, the Italians felt at home with their kindred Mediterranean compadres, the Germans standoffish, and the Americans infinitely less reverent and more concerned about the price of olive wood trinkets and having their pictures taken with camels and donkeys. Tata Maria spoke Arabic, Russian, Greek, and enough Hebrew, German, English, and French to carry on meaningful conversations. A good looker in her younger days and in the presence of her husband, once a wealthy American tourist, taken by her charm and eye-catching Palestinian and Greek striking beauty, flirted with her and offered to take her to America. While we delighted in hearing this story, she derived more fun in narrating it, each time mimicking the Yankee’s accent who insisted on taking her photograph on his old Kodak Wirgin folding camera. A 50% Zenobia and a 50% Aphrodite, I worshipped this loving, kind, and gentle woman whose story-telling powers mesmerized me and took me and my twin brother to the four corners of the world and beyond.
In their store, Tata and her husband sold Mistka Arabieh (Gum Arabic), Yemeni incense and coffee, cardamom, hand embroidered silk or brocade notions, pillow cases, and kerchiefs, hand carved olive wood camels, jewelry boxes, crucifixes, olive wood, silver, and mother of pearl rosaries, and Christmas crèches, carved ivory and mother of pearl icons, crucifixes, picture frames, old coins, and so much more."
A widow by the time Palestine fell in 1948, the small souvenir shop and a new, racist, and brutal European colonizer appeared out of the ashes of Europe’s death camps, camps where the grotesque orgy of hate and killing that went unabated, a kind of bizarrely surreal “Goya-esque” cauldron of extermination that included 6 Jews and the oft forgotten 5.5 million others: Poles, Hungarians, Dutch, Romanians, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally and physically disabled.
I wonder what events and stories the ancient cobble stones anchored for centuries in the narrow pedestrian-only streets of Jerusalem’s Old City could tell us about the past and present agonies and wailings in the land of the prophets, a land whose capital city is Al Quds (the Holy City) for Palestinians, and Yerushalayem (city of Peace) for Israelis, a fought-over city that has yet to discover the ever elusive peace.
"Just as Eid and Ramadan are sacred religious occasions for Palestinian Muslims, a time when special delicacies such as Barazek, Ka’ak, Ma’moul, Burma, Ka’ak bi Asawer, Baklawa, and Ghraibé are baked, gifted, and consumed, Palestinian Christians take pride in making these same scrumptious delicacies.
Since my family lived in occupied West Jerusalem, like most Palestinians, the making and baking of these delicacies was both a familial and a communal ritualistic event that unfolded on the evening of Juma’a al Hazeené.
Somewhere in my hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala linger the images, sounds, and smells of our Palestinian family Easter preparations. The setting is either our kitchen or my grandmother’s kitchen just across and up the street. Vials of orange blossom water, rose water, olive oil, and water lined the countertop; bowls of flour, coarse and fine semolina, butter, yeast, and ground dates sat within easy reach; smaller vials of walnuts, pistachios, toasted sesame seed, ground cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg, including mahlab (an aromatic spice), and mistka (gum Arabic) crowded the rest of the countertop.
The gathering would begin when mother and an aunt would mix all the dough ingredients in a large tub, all the while pulling, stretching, and kneading the dough; a bit of flour would be sprinkled to keep the dough from sticking to the bowl; and large portions of the by now springy dough would be drawn in aerial circular motions from the top, only to be supplanted back to the bottom where the olive oil and butter awaited the plunging propulsion of hands into the off white semolina dough. The process is a tediously grinding one. Once the dough is ready, as many as five people, mostly females, sit in a circle, dip into the tub of the by now elastic dough, and, depending on whether a Ka’aak bi Ma’Moul or a Ka’aak bi Ajwe is the desired goal, they work through the entire tub until its contents disappear.
Ka’aak bi Ma’Moul are shaped (by hand) into a hollow 3.5 inch equilateral triangle with a flat base and a pointed pyramidal apex. Prior to sealing the pliable dough, a concoction of pistachios, walnuts, rosewater, cinnamon and other spices are stuffed; rose water provides an added rich flavor. When making the Ka’aak bi Ajwe, the reader is urged to think of 3.5 inch miniature tire-tubed shaped dough, the interior of which is stuffed with ground dates. Each of the above is placed on a large tray and allowed to harden. Once the dough has sufficiently hardened, the team begins to use half-inch wide corrugated, pincer-like utensils to pinch the dough’s surface in a combination of hatching and cross-hatching patterns. My mother bequeathed her heirloom utensil to my sister, and, upon moving into a retirement home, my sister gifted these same utensils to a sister-in-law.
True or not, I am told that the triangular Ma’Moul shape represents the Holy Trinity, and the circular one represents eternity.
Once the yeast has done it work, these delicious cookies are baked, sprinkled with powdered sugar, shared with relatives and neighbors, and consumed with a stout cup of Turkish coffee.
I so wish that my sons, nieces and nephews had a visual record of the Easter family Kaak and Ma’Mool sessions enacted in the Upper Baq’aa, West Jerusalem neighborhood Halaby home, a place that nurtured me, helped shape my personality, and inculcated in me a deep sense of justice and worthy moral values I’ve attempted to instill in my boys."
Since 1948 Israel has systematically connived and plotted to fragment and destroy Palestinian culture and to deny its existence.
Strong family bonds and traditions such as the baking of Easter and Eid cookies, communal sessions of three generations of women embroidering the Palestinian Thowbs (gowns) or wedding dresses, the singing of a mawwal to the beat of a durbakké, the recitation of poetry, the planting and harvesting of vegetables and fruits, the respect for elders, the story telling sessions, the large feasts, and the tradition of generosity and sacrifice for family members and community are encoded in the DNA of every Palestinian. And it is precisely the extension of these resilient and durable family bonds and traditions, instilled in the collective Palestinian consciousness, that will prevent Israel and its Zionist allies from killing Palestinians with the deadly virus called Israeli Occupation.
The determined Palestinian Sumud will never allow Israel and her apologists to relegate Palestinians to the crematorium of history.
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