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B’Tselem in the Crosshairs

Dan Steinbock — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:21:15 +0000

In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel.

In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?

B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide.

In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?

Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

Whose “foreign subversion”?

B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state

Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

Originally published by Informed Comment.

The post B’Tselem in the Crosshairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Steinbock.

High-tech textiles can protect workers from the heat — but not from their bosses

Ayurella Horn-Muller — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 08:15:00 +0000

Nick Lubecki has been an urban farmer in Pittsburgh for the last 15 years. The heat has noticeably intensified over that time, with back-to-back summers of sweltering temperatures affecting when he harvests produce at Braddock Farm, a small urban plot nestled next to an operating steel mill that grows vegetables like lettuce, collards, and tomatoes. His current strategy for beating the brutal heat: a wide brim hat and plenty of water. Lately, farming consistently throughout the day has been “significantly more exhausting,” he said. “It’s really hard to keep going.”

Summers are getting hotter everywhere, and that is especially true in cities including Pittsburgh, which this year has seen more than four times the number of days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit than it does in a typical year. That’s due in part to the urban heat island effect, in which a city’s infrastructure traps heat, making it hotter than in neighboring suburbs. To combat the growing health risks for outdoor workers like Lubecki, scientists and designers are developing a slate of new fabrics to counteract extreme heat. But worker-safety specialists and labor advocates are concerned that commercializing wearable technologies — even with the best of intentions — may end up aggravating existing issues with worker exploitation.

To cope with climate change and stay healthy outside, humans need adaptations, and heat-reflecting textiles have the potential to play a crucial role. Such solutions are “super important to not only show that there’s some really cool technology that’s resulting from this need,” said Enrique Huerta, legislative director at Climate Resolve, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable climate solutions, but also that there is “a need to deploy it responsibly. That’s really, really important to highlight.”

What makes the urban heat island effect so dangerous is its cumulative nature. During the day, the built environment — concrete, asphalt, brick — readily absorbs the sun’s energy. At night, a city slowly releases all that built-up heat, keeping temperatures extra-high into the morning. If you don’t have air conditioning and your body can’t cool down at night, and a heat wave continues day after day, the stress builds and builds. Nellie Brown, director of Workplace Health and Safety Programs at Cornell University, says that workers exposed to such conditions without relief are vulnerable to illnesses like heatstroke, but can, in extreme cases, experience serious brain damage, kidney failure, and even death.

In a recent report, Climate Central, a nonprofit that communicates climate science, studied the urban heat island index, or UHI, in 65 large U.S. cities to calculate how much the built environment boosts temperatures. “The other major component … is population density, because we as people create a lot of waste heat with our activities,” said Jennifer Brady, senior data analyst at Climate Central. “So cars, buses, trucks can create waste heat.” Of the 50 million people included in Climate Central’s analysis, 68 percent lived in areas with a UHI of 8 degrees or higher.

Lower-income neighborhoods also tend to be zoned for more industrial activities, with fewer trees and more asphalt and large buildings, all of which absorb and then radiate heat. That’s especially perilous if those workers live and sleep in high-UHI neighborhoods elsewhere, and they’re coming to work after a night of still-sweltering temperatures. This is where a fabric that can alleviate some of the physical symptoms of heat on the body could end up serving as a lifeline.

Special textiles exist already to help cool a wearer by scattering direct sunlight away from the body or by emitting infrared radiation — which would be handy when you’re out on a hike or, say, working in a backyard garden. A legion of U.S. apparel companies manufacture clothing that helps mitigate the heat from direct sunlight, but those fabrics aren’t designed to offset the oppressive heat that gets trapped in cityscapes. In a city, the built environment radiates heat from below, too, presenting an additional engineering challenge.

Frida Garza & Ayurella Horn-Muller

In June, researchers presented a clever new textile design that can indeed counter the urban heat island effect. The top layer is made of plastic polymethylpentene, or PMP, fibers, which let in heat radiating from roads and buildings. Underneath that layer is silver nanowire, which is very good at reflecting that heat back through the PMP fibers and away from the body. Below that, against the skin, is a layer of wool that acts as a buffer.

“It provides very good mechanical support, because those PMP and silver nanowires are extremely thin,” said University of Chicago materials scientist Po-Chun Hsu, co-author of the new study. Like a plain white shirt helps bounce some of the sun’s energy away from the body, this new textile can deflect the heat that comes from below, like from asphalt and city sidewalks.

But, as with any new product created to counteract extreme heat and other climate impacts, there’s the possibility of exploitation, says Dominique O’Connor, who works at the Farmworker Association of Florida. The growers and contractors in charge of farms, for example, “might feel that they can push [workers] even harder or have less need for giving them breaks or water.”

Any heat-resistant clothing adopted by outdoor workers at the behest of their employer could also end up being a financial burden if they’re expected to pay for it, according to O’Connor. Another concern is the question of garment care, as she doesn’t expect employers will offer laundering services for designated work clothes — she points out many already don’t offer enough bathroom facilities or breaks — meaning workers themselves will have to pay for multiple shirts, or otherwise be stuck cleaning the same item after every shift. This underscores the need for some sort of regulation to protect the misuse of such a solution, she said, although the likelihood of said regulation is low, given the fact that a federal heat standard for workers is still not finalized.

Some labor groups say that while such materials and fabrics may be able to play a role in mitigating individual impacts of heat, such surface-level solutions shouldn’t be substituted for policy interventions that target the core problem: a lack of protections for workers from heat stress.

Nellie Brown at Cornell, who provides training and technical assistance on occupational safety and health issues, noted that the customization of any prospective fabrics to what individual workplaces and jobs demand should be the biggest safety consideration. All proposed solutions should go through the “hierarchy of controls,” Brown said — a method by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration that identifies and ranks safeguards against hazards in the workplace.

Hsu compares the newly designed materials to the introduction of air conditioning, which has saved countless lives, especially as the world rapidly warms. “It’s proven to be an extremely huge boost to people’s productivity, especially in tropical countries,” says Hsu. “Then you will run into the question of whether this will introduce overworking. But I think that comes after you solve this heat stress or heatstroke issue.”

Though the textile that specifically targets the urban heat island effect is not on the market yet, other heat-repelling fabrics are. O’Connor’s team in Apopka, Florida, is considering whether to move forward with investing in clothing already on the market to freely distribute to the farmworkers they serve. The shirts, from an apparel company called Fieldsheer, are made with a brand of technology intended to mitigate a wearer’s body heat.

Her colleague Jeannie Economos, however, remains conflicted — will heat-combating apparel be useful, or end up creating more problems for outdoor workers, whether in the city or the fields, many of whom are already beleaguered by issues? “We have been hesitating buying them,” said Economos. “We don’t want to promote the shirts as some kind of miracle thing.”

Patrick Deighan, a spokesperson at Fieldsheer, told Grist that their fabrics, made from a blend of recycled polyester and spandex and “infused with minerals,” effectively “pull moisture and heat from the skin and use the body’s heat to evaporate at a faster rate, enhancing the evaporative cooling effect, leading to enhanced comfort and performance.” He noted that the line of shirts are designed to be used in multiple environments, including outdoors and indoors, and on the job, but didn’t comment on the concerns raised by Economos and other labor advocates.

Others, like Lubecki, are more open to the idea. “If it’s something that might help, I’ll give it a shot, if it’s any good,” he said. Still, he’s cautiously optimistic, and can’t help but wonder how accessible solutions like heat-resistant work wear are to the agricultural workforce. “Honestly, like every year I hear about some new thing that someone is excited about. It’s supposed to make things cooler, and I don’t know, maybe it does. But the cost point has to make sense.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline High-tech textiles can protect workers from the heat — but not from their bosses on Aug 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Apple waste, spider silk, enhanced cotton: How bio-based textiles could replace plastic in our clothing

Claire Elise Thompson — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:22:19 +0000

The spotlight

If you’ve read any climate-related news in the past several years, you’re probably familiar with the scourge of microplastics. These tiny bits of plastic end up clogging oceans. They show up at alarming rates in bottled water, food, clouds — and in the human body. A study published just last month in the journal Toxicological Sciences tested 62 placentas, and found microplastics, in varying concentrations, in every single one. While their long-term impacts on human health are still largely unknown, another study published earlier this month linked microplastics in arteries with increased risk of heart attacks and stroke.

A lot of attention has focused on phasing out single-use plastics, which create visible plastic pollution and release microplastics when they break down. But there’s growing recognition that plastics, and microplastics, are hidden in a staggering number of products we depend on — including, notably, our clothing.

The bits of plastic shed from synthetic textiles have their own term: microfibers. Scraps of polyester, nylon, elastane, and other synthetic fabrics slough off of our clothes in the course of wearing, storing, and washing them. Laundry alone may account for about a third of the microplastics released into the ocean each year — and some innovations and regulations have emerged to reduce the transfer of microplastics from our washing machines to our water systems. But another set of innovators are imagining something bigger: what our clothes could be made of instead.

The problem, of course, is that plastics are so darn functional. Synthetic fibers are typically cheaper to produce than organic materials, and they also offer performance benefits, like stretchiness and weatherproofing.

“The age of plastic began because it mimicked other things, and the functionality was so good that it became its own thing,” fashion designer Uyen Tran told Grist, when we interviewed her for our 2023 Grist 50 list. In 2020, Tran founded a company called TômTex to create bio-based materials that can replace synthetic fabrics as well as leather and suede. She believes that a wave of new materials is ready to outcompete plastic-based textiles. “I think biomaterial is on the edge of becoming its own thing as well. Just give us a few more years, and you will see.”

In this newsletter, we’re rounding up a handful of the materials — from apple waste to artificial spider silk — that are already on the market, offering a glimpse of a plastic-free future for our textiles.

Shrimp shells: TômTex’s bio fabrics are made out of the waste from mushrooms and shrimp shells. The company sources the latter partially from the shrimp industry in Tran’s native Vietnam, which creates hundreds of tons of shell waste annually. And, Tran noted in her Grist 50 profile, she eventually hopes to build a network of regional production facilities all over the world, sourcing materials from waste streams in different regions. The company debuted its fully biodegradable shell-based fabric at New York Fashion Week in 2022, in a collaboration with designer Peter Do. Its mushroom-based fabric was seen on runways in both London and Paris Fashion Weeks in 2023. Read more

Apple mush: Another example of a company harnessing waste streams as raw materials for textiles is Allégorie, a New York-based accessory company making bags and wallets out of apple pomace — the mush left behind from juicing — as well as cactus, mangos, and pineapple leaves. Co-founder Heather Jiang told Marie Claire that some of the products even retain a pleasant, fruity scent.

Allégorie’s fruit-based products are meant to offer a better vegan leather, as the majority of faux leather products currently on the market are made of plastics like polyurethane and vinyl. The company also sees reducing food waste as part of its mission. Read more

Old cotton: A perhaps less surprising waste stream is used clothing itself. Early last year, a Swedish company called Renewcell opened the world’s first commercial-scale textile-recycling facility, the BBC reports. The company shreds old cotton clothing (with up to 5 percent non-cotton content), like shirts and jeans, and then chemically processes them to separate the fibers, which results in a simple organic compound called cellulose. This can then be spun into new viscose fabric.

The big sell here is reducing textile waste; more than 100 billion clothing items are produced each year, and only 1 percent end up getting cycled into new garments. But the company is using that existing stock instead of plastic to make new clothes — and clothes that in turn won’t create more microplastics. The mill has contracts with a number of suppliers, including Swedish fashion giant H&M. Read more

Enhanced cotton: A company called Natural Fiber Welding is working on enhancing natural materials like cotton to confer some of the same benefits that synthetic fabrics offer. Wired reports on how the process, known as (you guessed it!) “fiber welding,” uses liquid salts to partially break down the fibers and then fuse them together, creating longer and stronger threads that can mimic some of the coveted characteristics of synthetics, like strength and durability, especially relevant for athletic and outdoor apparel. The company announced a partnership with Patagonia in 2021. Read more

Lab-grown spider silk: A Japanese company called Spiber is pioneering what it calls “brewed protein” fibers — a way to produce desirable natural substances in a lab. As The Japan Times reports, it began in 2007 with efforts to engineer spider silk, which has long been admired for its strength, durability, and lightness. (Hence the name, which combines “spider” and “fiber.”) The company’s first product, made from a silk protein synthesized by bacteria enhanced with a snippet of spider DNA, was used in 2015 by The North Face, in a prototype coat called the Moon Parka.

But the company encountered a challenge in trying to create a product that wouldn’t shrink when wet, as spiderwebs do. Today, taking lessons from its initial engineering process, Spiber produces a brewed protein material that does not replicate any specific natural substance. The novel material is now being used by sportswear company Goldwin (the distributor for The North Face in Japan), which hopes to have 10 percent of its new products use brewed protein by 2030. Read more

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

Read: more about microfibers, and some of the technological and regulatory solutions that could stop them escaping from laundry machines into waterways (Grist)
Read: an article about “instant fashion” and its heavy dependence on polyester (Harvard Business Review)
Read: about a mountain of clothing waste that was burned in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 2022 — essentially an oil fire (Grist)
Read: more about the growth of biomaterials, in clothing and other industries (Dezeen)

A parting shot

Another increasingly common bio-based textile is lyocell. The semi-synthetic fiber, also sometimes known by the brand name Tencel, is famous for its softness and its relative sustainability. It’s made by chemically dissolving wood pulp (usually fast-growing eucalyptus), pushing the mixture through a shower-head-like device called a spinneret, and then spinning the fibers into a yarn. In this photo from The Fashion Awards 2023 in London, Nicole Scherzinger (of Pussycat Dolls fame) wears a custom Tencel gown by Patrick McDowell, a luxury designer who only uses sustainable and recycled fabrics.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Apple waste, spider silk, enhanced cotton: How bio-based textiles could replace plastic in our clothing on Mar 13, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.