To our friends,

Yesterday, we released a new issue of The New York War Crimes, our free movement paper. The Summer Edition brings together writings from southern Lebanon and Gaza, grounding our readers in the daily reality of the Zionist entity’s expanded military operations across the region. We learn about the heroic journalists who chose death over silence; the brave paramedics in Sour conducting rescue missions under Israeli drone fire; and the child orphans facing the unimaginable in Gaza. This issue also offers analysis of the continued capitulation of governments across the region to the Zio-American agenda, the U.S. media’s craven attempts to dodge accountability for their role in Israel’s crimes, and FIFA’s collusion with the so-called “Board of Peace” to profit from the ongoing genocide.

Read the whole edition here, and find individual pieces linked at the bottom of this newsletter. 

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Grind the imperial war machine to a halt

Lebanon today stands at a crossroads, facing down both Israeli military occupation and a government committed to normalization with the Zionist state at the expense of the South’s sovereign land and people. In the Syrian Golan Heights, the Israeli occupation has seized an additional 350 kilometers of land, roughly the size of Cairo. Instead of condemning the theft, the Syrian government — on the precipice of hosting its first U.S. business forum — has surrendered the Golan, removing the region from its official map of the country. The genocide in Gaza has now passed the 1,000-day mark. The IOF claims to have seized 60 percent of the Strip, aiming for 70, while escalating daily bombardment and blocking the entry of critical humanitarian aid. 

Despite this vast web of death and devastation, the Zionist entity today faces the gravest threat to its existence in half a century.

The war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow crooks in the cabinet had hoped that Al-Aqsa Flood would unlock the gates to absolute domination in the region. Normalization deals would come in quick succession; the resources of the region would become theirs to loot and plunder; glittering towers would rise from the rubble of Gaza. Emboldened to escalate the genocide they committed with an ever-increasing flow of American dollars and weapons, Israeli politicians convinced the U.S. government to launch an assault on Iran, one that they believed would deal a death blow to the Resistance Axis.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran did not and will not fall. Not from the Mossad spies that filtered into Tehran and armed monarchists with ambitions to overthrow the government, nor from the violent Zio-American air raids on Tehran that sent fiery mushroom clouds into the air and led to downpours of black rain, nor from the assassinations of senior Iranian figures, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Commander-in-chief Mohammad Pakpour, and Ali Larijani. Iran perseveres, not only as a state hostile to Zionist imperialism, but as a staunch supporter of resistance against Israel and a powerful counterweight to the wave of capitulation from governments across the region. 

Iran’s resistance remains formidable despite nearly 50 years of Western sanctions that have suffocated its economy and imposed immense hardship on its people. While Lebanon’s leaders cobble together toothless words of censure for Israel’s repeated massacres in the South, and self-appointed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa busies himself with lavishing praise on Donald Trump and celebrating the new warmth in U.S.–Syrian relations, Iran acts with the calculus of a revolutionary republic forged in resistance to Western imperialism.

Iran’s victory can reshape the regional order in favor of the Resistance Axis working to end the scourge of Zionism. Across the imperial core, a renewed focus is required: expose the enemy’s crimes, exploit its hubris, and grind the imperial war machine to a halt. 

Read the rest of our editorial here.

Join us in Oakland…

…for a discussion with Omar Zahzah on his new book Terms of Servitude and the state of the Palestine solidarity movement. This free event will be held at the Oakland Liberation Center on July 29 at 5:30 p.m. Write to wawog@wawog.com for more information.

Expose Zionism’s structural sexual violence

A major new report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, supported by the Progressive International, documents Israel’s systematic use of sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians, across detention centers, homes, military operations, and systems of surveillance, from the Nakba of 1948 to the present. In the report, titled A Predatory State, researchers and organizers show how this violence, far from being incidental or unique to the present, is a historical manifestation and a systemic mechanism of settler-colonial rule.

Read the report in full at predatorystate.org.

Shame on PEN America

Dinaw Mengestu resigned his position as PEN America’s board president on July 10, following the publication of a special report on the “isolation and exclusion” some Israeli and Jewish writers are feeling. One of these writers is an Israeli PhD student who fears submitting her debut novel to publishers, lest they reject it. Another is a translator distressed by the apparent lack of appetite for new works in Hebrew. Between somber recountings of these and other picayune complaints, the report reiterated PEN America’s “longstanding position” against cultural and academic boycotts — a stance formed in reactionary opposition to Palestinian and pro-Palestinian political speech, specifically the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel and Israeli institutions.   

We salute Mengestu’s principled decision. Our grassroots pressure campaign, which included a successful boycott of the organization, made it clear that normalization of Zionism will never again be tolerated by the literary community. PEN America must learn from the lessons of the past three years and recommit itself to Palestinian writers. There can be no freedom to write without a free Palestine.

Call out HonestReporting Canada’s Lies

Following two formal complaints by WAWOG Toronto and Just Peace Advocates, the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) is attempting to revoke the charitable status of a wing of HonestReporting Canada, a sham “media watchdog” organization that claims to expose when “antisemitism hides behind a mask of anti-Israel criticism” in Canadian media. In reality, HonestReporting Canada disseminates lies, defames journalists, and launches harassment and intimidation attacks against media outlets, writers, healthcare workers, lawyers and others who are critical of Israel.

The CRA audit reiterates WAWOG Toronto’s campaign against HonestReporting Canada: the group’s charitable status provides a veneer of legitimacy for an anti-Palestinian lobbying operation. In a joint statement, Just Peace Advocates and Writers Against the War on Gaza Toronto said: “It should be a profound mark of shame that Canadian tax dollars have been subsidizing HRC’s funders for this long — donations earmarked for doxing, misinformation and anti-Palestinian racism.”

While the revocation is on hold during court challenges, the billionaire-funded Zionist charity can no longer issue donation receipts.  

Read the full breakdown here. 

Read The New York War Crimes with us

• Hanging in the Balance
  Gaza’s reconstruction must begin with accountability, not more arithmetic

• Broken Record
  We refuse to let the media revise its history of support for Israel’s genocide

• To the Guardian of Our Borders
  A letter to the journalist martyr Ali Shoeib

• ‘This is a war on the medical sector in every sense’
  An interview with the medical researcher Hadeel Deeb

• The Last Line of Defense
  Israel’s war on Lebanese paramedics in the South

• Did They Bulldoze My Father’s Grave?
  On the occupation’s cowardly destruction of Lebanon’s southern villages

• Gaza’s Orphan Generation
  For thousands of children, the most basic facts of a life have come undone

• Dancing on Graves
  FIFA, sportswashing, and the destruction of Palestinian football

• Free Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya!

• Remembering Anas al-Sharif, Without Distortion or Falsification

We leave you with the words of Dr. George Habash in his letter to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, published in the latest issue of The New York War Crimes:

Together and united on the frontlines.

Together and united in the resistance in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.

Together and united with the weapon of will that embraces the weapon of resistance.