Links for local action:

Jewish Voice for Peace Western Mass

UMass Amherst Faculty for Justice in Palestine

Valley Families for Palestine

Western Mass Coalition for Palestine

UMass Amherst SJP

2025

We’ve pledged to be an Apartheid Free organization and committed to withdrawing all support to Israeli apartheid.

Learn more: https://apartheid-free.org

Traprock offers copies of key brochure on history of the Palestine/Israel conflict.

To order single or multiple copies, contact traprockinfo@crocker.com

Phyllis Bennis Speaks in Greenfield

Political analyst to discuss Middle East, new book

By DOMENIC POLI- Staff Writer- Greenfield Recorder, April 3, 2025

GREENFIELD — A renowned expert on the Middle East will visit western Massachusetts next week for a pair of speaking engagements to discuss the situation in Palestine and her new book.

Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C., will speak at All Souls Church in Greenfield on Monday, April 7, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Tuesday, April 8, at 7 p.m. She is expected to focus her talk on the Gaza war and the United States’ role in it while also presenting her book, “Understanding Palestine and Israel,” which was published Feb. 25 by Palestinian owned, Northampton-based Interlink Publishing.

The Israel-Hamas conflict has dominated international headlines since Oct. 7, 2023, when the militant group attacked Israel and killed nearly 1,200 people, but Bennis is quick to point out that the hostilities “didn’t start that day.”

“I start with the question of, ‘When do you start the clock in looking at Palestine?’” she said.

Bennis said examining the situation since October 2023 will paint a particular picture, while putting the region under a microscope since Israel’s blockade in 2007 offers a very different one. But picking the Six-Day War in 1967 as a starting point presents still a different perspective.

“It’s always dependent on when you start the clock,” she noted.

Bennis is coming to Greenfield at the invitation of the Traprock Center for Peace & Justice, Western Mass CODEPINK and other organizations. Admission is free and doors open at 6 p.m.

“[Bennis] is such a deep expert, but she is not an academic only. She really knows how to answer people’s concerns and questions, and she has knowledge that goes back 30 years and more,” said Anna Gyorgy, who serves on Traprock’s board of directors. “She’s an expert on the whole Middle East.”

The termination of British responsibility for the administration of Palestine created the state of Israel in its place on May 14, 1948. It was the result of Zionism, a political movement that is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897 and supports a Jewish homeland. This ideology received a huge endorsement in 1917 in the form of the Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British government announcing support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people.” It gained momentum following the Holocaust, when approximately 6 million European Jews were killed by the Nazis, as many saw a Jewish state as a safeguard against future persecution.

Advocates of Zionism view it as a return of a people to their ancestral homeland. Jews lived on the land before and during the Roman Empire and throughout the rule of Islam from 637 until the end of World War I in 1917. But 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled for Israel’s creation in 1948.

Israel responded to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack with a large-scale ground invasion and at least 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that time. Nearly all of Gaza’s 2 million people have been displaced and the health care system has been badly affected, as hospitals often become the center of fighting. There is also a humanitarian crisis and famine in parts of Gaza because Israel blocked aid from entering in March.

Bennis said most young Gazans have lived every day of their lives trapped on a 141-square-mile strip of land, in a system many describe as apartheid. She said this does not justify the civilian deaths of Oct. 7, 2023, but “it explains things.”

Many who are critical of Israel or its actions are accused of antisemitism, or hatred of Jews, but Bennis said she is proud of her Jewish faith.

“I’m very much Jewish,” she said. “I’m not a Zionist.”

Bennis is an international adviser to Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization.

Some have a proposed resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a twostate solution, or the creation of two states on the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine, a geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948 under the terms of the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine.

“I think the solution has to be based on international law, equality for all and human rights,” Bennis said. “I think what’s needed is an anti-apartheid movement. The problem is not the presence of Israelis— the problem is the system of apartheid.”

2024

Dear Concerned Friends and Neighbors,

As of today more than 26,400 Gazans have been killed by Israel. This number includes over 10,000 children and 7,500 women. Far from starting on October 7th, the present horror in Gaza is an escalation of over seven decades of occupation, state-sponsored violence, blockade, and apartheid against Palestinians by Israel. This in no way denies nor condones the violence of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, which resulted in the death of over 1,100 people in Israel. But understanding the historical context is essential to ending the violence and forging a path toward enduring peace.

Food, fuel, medication, proper shelter, and water have been cut off by Israel in Gaza. Many civilians are killed while sheltering in hospitals, schools, places of worship and while fleeing on designated “safe routes” while holding white flags above their heads. Thousands are still under the rubble, over 62,681 are injured, and more than 367 Palestinians have been killed by settlers and Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. The number of deaths by starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, illness, and infection from injury rises with each passing day. Many of the aforementioned acts are in violation of international humanitarian laws and of Articles II and III of the Genocide Convention of 1948.

Genocide is the highest crime and none has been so publicly documented as the current Israeli genocide of Palestinians. We join in solidarity with the now more than 800 civil society organizations and dozens of countries that support South Africa in formally accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at the United Nations’ highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice.

The United States continues to send weapons to Israel, a foreign power accused of committing genocide, using our tax dollars. This moment urgently calls us to connect with our collective sense of humanity.  Stand out in solidarity with your community, educate yourself on the history of Palestine and the Israeli Occupation. Call your representatives today and every day. Remind them that it is their duty to speak for their constituents and call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Demand that the means to meet basic needs, including food, fuel, medicine, shelter, and clean water be allowed to flow into Gaza. Demand that the United States stop military support and aid to Israel, and that they provide humanitarian support to Gaza.

Traprock Center for Peace and Justice

Franklin County for Peace

Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution

Leahy Fast for Palestine Committee

NuclearBan.US

Western Mass Code Pink

Kairos/Franklin County Justice for Palestine 

Nuclear Free Future

Pax Christi Massachusetts

Jewish Voice for Western Massachusetts

Middle East Peace and Justice Coalition

Massachusetts Peace Action

Quabbin Mediation

Randy Kehler, First Director of Traprock Center for Peace and Justice

W. MA Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ)

To sign on in support send contact info to: Stop the Murder, c/o traprockinfo@crocker.com

Call today:

Download as PDF here

Let’s Talk About Palestine with Sherrill Hogan

Sherrill’s talk is now online here, thanks to GCTV and read the Recorder article from July 26, 2024.