Jennifer Abdo > Recent Status Updates

KKR [a rapacious private equity fund] is responsible for the epidemic of dollar stores, with a nasty little scam that targets poor and rural communities by surrounding their only grocery stores with dollar stores until the grocery stores go under, then closing all but one of the dollar stores, with the sole survivor raising prices and slashing staffing.

I try to phone my friend Philippe who is staying with his family in the church in the old city, to wish him a Merry Christmas. But there is no signal in Gaza City, as always. Baba Noel will not visit Gaza this year, I think. He wouldn't risk it. He's be shot in the head the moment he landed his sleigh.

Gaza has been abandoned. Nobody cares. Every day we hear of scores of massacres being committed on the ground, in which civilians are killed and no one even reports them. ... When the journalists headed south, they left the city unwatched, unmonitored, for the most trigger-happy genocidal young Israeli soldiers to do their worst.

How long is this sustainable? There are many who say the end of the year will mark the end of the war. ...people here are ready to believe anything that might lift their spirits and give them some hope. By Christmas, some are saying, or by New Year's Eve, Israel will ceasefire. Some refer to the forthcoming American elections as a reason for believing this - Biden will need to shore up his base.

Hope in Biden! Ugh!

In Rafah... ...once it was the route through which people from Africa reached Asia. The little road that crosses at the border used to be called 'Asia Street', a dirty path that was the only route between two continents. And to think, there was even a railway line that passed through here, taking passengers from Cairo to Jerusalem, until 1948, of course.

Ceasefire
No one is naive enough to think about a permanent peace, of course. For Gazans, war is like the weather, we live through it continually. We have no say in it; it just comes and goes, from the day we're born. Most Gazans have never left the Strip; they don't know what life feels like where war is not the norm; they don't know what freedom is either. They know they want it, but they've never really tasted it.

To his son as they move south--

"I tried to introduce a bit of its history, and talked about the massacre the Israeli army committed in 1956 here, in which part of our family who used to live in the refugee camp, were killed. Israeli soldiers went door-to-door through the camp, supposedly in search of fedayeen [militants], shooting over 250 Palestinians in the process. They did the same in Rafah."

Ugh. The woo-ing has pulled us further into today's morass every year. Whyyyyy keep doing it??

It was under this theory that Jimmy Carter started to remove a few of the Jenga blocks from the antitrust system. Then Ronald Reagan came along and tore them out by the fistful. (Most of the right-wing policies for which we remember Ronald Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed.)

1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you'll start seeing it, too.

'Don't look.' Strewn around randomly, along both sides of the road, are scores and scores of dead bodies. Rotting. Melting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out towards us from the window of a burnt-out car, as if asking for something - from me, specifically. Headless bodies here. Severed heads there. Limbs and precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester. 'Don't look,'

"For a week now, hospitals have been 'legitimate targets' turned into war zones, battle grounds, and the international community has just whistled to itself. Soldiers are accusing patients of hiding weapons of mass destruction, and have been re-opening wounds to see what they're hiding in there."

'How can people go on holiday on the graves of others?" Faraj asks.
"The entire Israeli tourist industry is built on it,' I say. "Come and party on Palestinian graves", they tell the world. "Dance and be merry beside the world's largest prison. Relax, have fun, enjoy yourselves!"

Some Israelis are calling on their government to transform the north of Gaza Strip into a giant entertainment park, a Disney World for colonisers and settlers. I remind Faraj that they did the same when they destroyed and demolished three Palestinian villages - Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nuba - in 1967. They called it 'Canada Park'. It lies just off the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem.

Even if the Israelis promise this is just a temporary deportation, for a limited time only, no one will believe them. This is exactly what happened in 1948. My grandmother was forced to leave her beautiful house in Jaffa, thinking she would return just a few days later. That was 75 years ago. Our hearts ache when we remember this collective loss. We all know what it looks like. It looks like this.

'What will happen?' I asked. 'What's their big plan?' "Occupation again?' Mohammed asked. 'Are they really going to occupy us? Do they even want that?' No one can guess where this is all headed, but of all the scenarios we fear, the most terrifying, the most dystopian is a fully evacuated 'North Gaza Strip'. A new Nakba, in short.

According to him, the tanks are now just half a kilometre from the Press House. Many people have been killed at the western end of the street, for just getting in the tanks' way. Another man tells me he saw talks and bulldozers destroying the mosque near the schools and the villas around it. 'They burn everything,' he shouts as he runs, without slowing down.

Despite being successful business people owning numerous offices in Gaza, Amman and Cairo, they suddenly found themselves homeless. In war, it does not matter how much you own or how rich or poor you are; money cannot buy safety or peace or neutrality; the target is always the same: your soul. The soldiers have their orders, their quotas, and their sights set.

"Most people, most of the time, choose safety over justice, comfort over courage, the familiar over the right. This isn't a condemnation -- it's human nature. But it makes the choice of those who chose differently all the more remarkable."

"The Underground Railroad's true history -- as opposed to its mythology -- teaches us to be skeptical of retroactive heroism. When everyone claims to have been part of the resistance, we should ask: Where were you when it mattered? When the risk was real? When the cost was high? The answers, then and now, are usually uncomfortable."

Of course! Another "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (book by Omar El Akkad)" moment is the Underground Railroad after slavery was abolished. Suddenly every house and church has a room or secret tunnel or order space that had helped fugitive slaves. Ugh! Read both books! Both are excellent for the moment. Essential even.

At its core, all resistance makes authority pay a price for abuse. Resistance makes it pause and recalculate whether the abuse is worth the price. Sometimes that is measured in dollars, which is a much easier burden to bear than losses in lives. But that single rendition of Anthony Burns cost the federal government a fortune--the equivalent of millions in today's money... The mathematics of resistance had shifted...

"I love peace," he stated. "But there is a means, and there is an end; liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means towards it."

Theodore Parker in the Burns Affair- President Pierce ordered the marines to Boston and 2000 armed men forced 21yo Anthony Burns from man to property, thru streets with buildings draped in black, a coffin labeled liberty in a window, putting abusive authority on full display.

Force the fight. Never stop. Not through days. Not through generations. Authority will always try to consolidate, to contain, to convince you that the fight is over and you've already won everything you need. The ghosts know better. They've always known better.

Suspicion is a virtue, as long as its object is the preservation of the public good.

"Resistance without clear ideological foundation is easily redirected or co-opted. You must know what you're fighting for, not just what you're against. Liberty of conscience. Authority in a republic exists only on loan from the governed."

"This book takes the side of people who resisted. ... American institutions were designed to protect property and power; the Constitution was an innovation in abusive authority that constitutionally enshrined exclusion;and progress came not from the system working as intended but from people forcing it to work differently--until the system adapted to contain them."

"It's about that potent moment when people, driven by their own will, their volition, move beyond just complaining or wishing within the system and take direct action without asking anyone's permission to demand, even force, fundamental change."