Opinion

Believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson was a committed abolitionist. His original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a long screed against the slave trade beginning,

It was the ONLY passage of the Declaration removed by a vote of the Continental Congress.

I am not trying to excuse Jefferson’s rank hypocrisy as an abolitionist with humans held as property. Rather, I want to underscore that slavery was not an accepted part of our political culture. In fact, the colony of Georgia OUTLAWED slavery until just before the revolution when King George gave the Habersham family a charter to bring Africans to the colony.

Local German and Swiss farmers objected strongly to bringing in Africans, petitioning the King to reverse his decision. They wrote:

Many political analysts believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is buying time in Gaza and Lebanon with the hope that Donald Trump returns to the White House, following the next November elections. 

 Whether this is the case or not, Trump, this time around, is unlikely to influence the outcomes of the war, or to alter Israel's fate.  

As hard as I try, in the privacy of my own being, not to get caught up in the scathing absurdities of the moment — e.g., the presidential election, America’ looming fascism, our love of money and war (to name a few) — yikes, here I am, caught up in it all.

And all I can do is reach for a larger truth . . . peace will prevail, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And it so quickly feels like a cliché. Welcome to cynicism!

I swat at it, push it away, but it’s always there. So calm down, I tell myself. I’m doing so right now. In the context of a Biden blank stare and a looming Trump presidency, here I am, reaching for a sense of hope and transcendence — a sense of belief, a sense of joy, that humanity is evolving, that the present is just a necessary flicker in our becoming.

I tried to cross into Jerusalem today (where I used to be a highschool
teacher) and was denied by the apartheid colonizers. My wife too. Our US
passports notwithstanding. This is a clear violation of the agreement
reached with the US State Department that allowed Israelis to enter the US
on a visa waiver program. US citizens are not treated with respect agreed
to. Over the weekend we were stopped from doing our field work in the
Jordan valley by these apartheid regime forces. This was not the first
time. On so many occasions we are harassed and prevented from having any
normalcy.  In other parts of Palestine, the situation is much worse. In
Gaza Strip alone over the past nine months 186,000 Palestinians were killed
by bombing them, by denial of food, water, medicine and by destroying their
infrastructure etc.  As I am in touch with many families in Gaza by phone I
hear horror stories including literally starving to death and if there is a
food it is only bread or only rice (no proteins, vegetables, milk, fruits
etc). And what worries me more are families we lost touch with (no phones).

During this past week, more evidence has emerged that Israel allowed the attacks of October 7th to happen, that Israel military enacted the Hannibal directive which allows them to kill their own soldiers and citizens rather than allow them to be taken hostage, and that the propaganda regarding dead babies and rape stories are not true.

Additionally, the Lancet reports that by “applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”. This is 8% of the population.

(The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also one of the world's highest-impact academic journals.[1][2] )