Bread Not Bombs
The US government wants to scare us away from donating to Gaza - don’t listen to them
Today is day 1015 of genocide.
Earlier this week, news broke that the Spanish government arrested Fergie Chambers on orders from the US Department of Justice. The Trump Administration has requested (demanded?) the extradition of Chambers to the United States, where he faces “terrorism financing” charges.
This isn’t necessarily a post about Chambers but - for those of you who aren’t following the story - he is/was an heir to the Cox family fortune, one of the richest families in the United States. In 2023, he cut ties with his family, sold his stake in Cox Enterprises, and began giving away much of his wealth to anti-imperialist and international solidarity projects, including Gaza-based mutual aid initiatives like The Sameer Project. According to reporting in Middle East Eye:
Among Chambers’ more recent humanitarian initiatives was a $250,000 donation to the Sameer Project.
The organisation said the contribution was “critical to our work” and “a lifeline to a population suffering during displacement, a famine, a man-made water crisis, and the systematic destruction of the medical system”.
The funding helped establish a bakery producing 3,600 free loaves of bread a day in northern Gaza, complete a desalination plant supplying 150,000 litres of clean water daily, and operate a free medical clinic in Jabalia treating up to 300 patients each day.
I’m not interested in wading into the chatter around Chambers’ character, motivation, white savior complex, or beef with other perpetually online folks in “the movement” (that’s what Twitter is for). Having an American millionaire float mutual aid projects is both crucial and incomplete, in terms of what is needed in an anti-imperialist anti-colonial struggle. One reality is that thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of people in Gaza - because of the Zionist-US genocide - are forced to rely on major donations from people like Chambers in order to help stay alive. Another reality is that, as smaller individual donations dry up, big donors are more crucial than ever. Both of these realities make everyone in Gaza even more vulnerable.
What I really want to focus on and think about is how these accusations against Chambers are not new in the United States. Since 9/11, the US has targeted Palestinian aid organizations by accusing them of providing “material support for terrorism.” The most famous case involves The Holy Land Foundation, originally the Occupied Land Fund. Throughout the 90s, the US government had been secretly surveilling the HLF which, at the time, was the largest Muslim charitable organization in the US, with a mission to “find and implement practical solutions for human suffering through humanitarian programs that impact the lives of the disadvantaged, disinherited, and displaced peoples suffering from man-made and natural disasters.” Additionally, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress, and the Israeli Government, all pressured the US government to take action against the HLF. In December 2001, the US “department of Justice” accused the HLF of providing “material support to terrorism,” designated it a “Domestic Terrorist Organization,” seized its assets, forcibly closed the organization, and arrested five of the seven HLF founders. The first case resulted in a mistrial but the case was later retried and, in 2008, these five men, all Palestinian-American, were given prison sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years.
(For more information, you can watch a documentary about the case here or on Watermelon Pictures and read this excellent book).
Also in the early 2000s, the Palestinian scholar, writer, activist, and former University of South Florida computer engineering professor Dr. Sami Al-Arian, was surveilled, harassed, suspended from his job, arrested on faulty and falsified terrorism charges, tried, and eventually convicted of conspiracy and - once again - “material support for terrorism.” He was imprisoned (often in solitary confinement) throughout the three and a half year trial and finally deported to Turkey in 2008. You can watch a documentary about his case here.
In 2024, the Biden administration similarly made such accusations against the Vancouver-based Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. This came after a three year campaign by then Zionist minister of “defense” Benny Gantz, who was accusing multiple North American-based Palestine-focused NGOs of being terrorist organizations. According to the Arab Center Washington DC:
Samidoun, meaning “steadfast” in Arabic, is an international grassroots organization comprised of a network of activists across the United States, Canada, several European countries, Palestine, and Lebanon. It was founded following a 2011 hunger strike protesting inhumane conditions in Israeli prisons to provide resources and organize advocacy for justice for and liberation of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel. (3,428 Palestiniansare currently in administrative detention in Israel.) Since October 2023, Samidoun has faced increased scrutiny for organizing educational events and demonstrations against the war on Gaza across several countries.
The US government, under pressure from the Zionist State and powerful Zionist organizations and individuals based North America, is ready and willing to accuse those who are providing necessary aid to Palestinians in Gaza as “terrorists” or of providing “material support to terrorism.” Such tactics are meant to make an example out of those who are publicly targeted in an attempt to silence and stifle the rest of us.
Everyone I speak to in Gaza has told me that donations are at an all-time low. The arrest and potential extradition of Chambers is meant to be a threat and a warning to us all. Accusations of “financing terror” is meant to create both a chilling effect and a decrease in donations.
So here’s a plea - let that impact the way you relate to mutual aid in Gaza but not in the way the Zionists and imperialist and fascists and génocidaires hope. Instead, let’s use this moment to be more generous, to send more money, to fundraise more actively, and continue to do everything we can to get lifesaving support into Gaza. Chambers’ financial support has been crucial but a revolutionary movement cannot rely on one (or several) big funders. We need critical mass and collective action.
This case is supposed to make us scared. My hope is that it instead makes us louder.
This week we raised $275 for the Food and Water Campaign, which is currently raising money for the Sameer Project bakery Chambers helped fund:
Please keep supporting mutual aid initiatives like The Sameer Project. And don’t let the monsters in power win.
Well said Maura. Thank you for writing.
Giving in to fear and intimidation will not make any of us safe and it will just let the administration ratchet up their hold on us. Just like any bully. They are seeing what they can get away with and taking more. This is not new in history. And those of us in a relatively safe place should not back off in whatever we can do, we should do more.