Some excerpts; Last month, I was in Dubai for a reporting trip and met a Palestinian American woman named Alaa’ Odeh at a dinner party. In our conversation I did something I’ve never done before: urge someone to vote for a particular candidate. Odeh said she felt genuinely torn. Could she support Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unstinting support of Israel, whatever the cost to civilians in Gaza? Surely, As I was leaving the dinner, we exchanged details and promised to keep in touch.
Over the past few weeks, I keep going back to that moment as the horrors in Gaza and Lebanon have escalated. A year into the war, Israel is undertaking a pitiless siege of northern Gaza, halting the already anemic flow of humanitarian aid while relentlessly attacking hospitals, crumbling apartment buildings and schools used as shelters by the displaced, asserting that Hamas fighters are hiding among medical workers and other civilians.
Meanwhile, the gyre widens in the Middle East. A growing number of scholars are coming to share the view that the slaughter in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. South Africa was back at the International Court of Justice this week, submitting some 750 pages of evidence to support its genocide claim against Israel.
“The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands told Al Jazeera.
Last week I reached out to Odeh, the Palestinian American woman I had met in Dubai.She told me that in the end she had decided not to vote. Many people in her life, she said, were voting for Jill Stein, but she decided against it.
posted by f.sheikh