The Lady In The Sabra Hat
Food deserts are not natural, and neither are famines.
The Garden
I’m covered in mulch up to my elbows, standing on a picnic table, lecturing a bunch of strangers on the racist history of a highway. Alex is stopping another volunteer from using the community garden as their personal market. We are in a small triangle lot along the north side of Virginia’s oldest public housing neighborhood, Gilpin Court. Periodically, outsiders gather at this garden to feel better about their privileges. They mostly show up after another release of body cam footage of Black death. A couple summers back, on a hot Saturday morning, I’ve insisted on talking to a small crowd about exactly what they didn’t want to hear, hoping that if people just had the right context, things would be different.
“Don’t call this place a food desert. Shit, don’t even call what we did today food justice. We have to acknowledge something: all this around us was planned. Intentional, not natural. When just across the bridge there are supermarkets and fruit trees? Where people live two decades longer? This is no desert. This is two peoples in the same place being treated differently. This is apartheid.” I spoke loudly, in competition with the constant noise of freeway traffic behind us and jackhammers and bulldozers ahead of us.
None of this was our plan. The Gilpin garden was started by - and is maintained by - a revolving door of benefactors of the non profit industrial complex. The care the garden receives mirrors the grant cycles more than it does resident needs. Alex and I wanted to throw everything we had at making this right and we soon over extended ourselves to maintaining gardens across the city. Usually it was just us, pulling weeds and passing out harvests, but since the latest viral police murder, people have come en masse to be absolved of the country’s racism. We tried to be grateful, but the surge was actually a nuisance. People broke tools, smothered plants, and treated the garden beds like their pantry. It’s striking, even in their effort to show solidarity, so many outsiders still acted a fool. For weeks crowds of volunteers made Gilpin residents choose the long way around in order to avoid us. After one too many anti-racist selfies, I decided to climb up on a table and start lecturing.
“This whole place used to be a safe haven. Harlem of the South. Black Wall Street. Before it was the Gilpin projects, it was Jackson Ward, one of the most important neighborhoods in the nation,“ I start. “Going back to before the founding of this country, Black people sought refuge here in Jackson Ward. Back when Virginia was still the Virginia Company of London, the law said any enslaved person that got free had to leave the state immediately.”1
We stood in the shade of a few small trees which separate Gilpin from major railroad tracks but dense summer heat radiated off the World War II-era bunker style apartments.
“So faced with the choice between an unaffordable and uncertain journey or being re-enslaved in the prison system, people chose a third option: to live as property again, but instead belonging to free Black people with homes right here, in what became Jackson Ward. After emancipation, even more people came, making homes, starting businesses and building lives,” I pointed to the opposite end of the neighborhood. “Until it was all destroyed!”
A few blocks away, just past the big admin building, the ground disappears, falling twenty feet into the eight-lane concrete canyon of Interstate 95 before rising back up to a fractured, gentrified Jackson Ward on the other side. As I speak, a few people are nodding. Others start fidgeting. This is not what they expected when they came to volunteer at the garden. But if there is no context to this gardening, if we fool ourselves into believing that these eight raised beds will make a difference for the 800 Gilpin households, we are aiding and abetting the injustice.
There’s a lady at the back of the group, much older than everyone else, her eyes hiding behind designer sunglasses and a crisp red Sabra hat. I can’t tell how much she’s listened to, but I can tell she’s not convinced. She’s lost in thought, staring away from the group, somewhere beyond the horizon. And she knows something. I change my tone.
“Y’all know about sundown towns, right?” I ask. Heads nod again. “Well Jackson Ward, budded up next to the State Capitol and all the old money that surrounded it, was like a town inside of a sundown town. People left to work or shop, but they better be back in their neighborhood before the street lights came on. Disobedience risked prison time.”2 My eyes can’t leave the bright red hat. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t see what was right in front of me.
“It was the 1950s. Civil Rights was lurching the nation towards integration, allowing Black and brown people to use the same parks, same libraries, same businesses, and same schools as white folks. For the first time in the city’s history, Black people were becoming allowed to roam freely and exist equally. What did white people do in response? They fought and they fled. And the nationwide network of interstates, like this monstrosity behind us, was used for both.” I went on.
“They called it slum clearance. Urban renewal. Instead of the original plan that went completely around Richmond, the all-white Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority shot I-95 through the heart of Jackson Ward, cutting the neighborhood in half, evicting a thousand families, destroying its world-known economy, and beginning the long process of complete displacement.3 This highway section was one of the first to open up nationwide, but what was designed here was exported to Black neighborhoods across the country,” I went on and on.
“In Miami’s Overtown neighborhood and business district, instead of running along the abandoned railroad tracks, I-95 cut down a thriving community of 40,000 to just one quarter it’s original size.4 New Orleans calls I-10 the Monster.5 The Black Panther Party started developing shortly after I-980 tore through their west Oakland neighborhood.6 West Baltimore. Wilmington. Boston. New York. Camden. Atlanta. Milwaukee. Indianapolis. Nashville. Omaha. Kansas City. Jacksonville. Pittsburgh. Philly. Detroit.”7 I went on and on and on.
There was actually an era of revolt. The 41,000 mile national highway project, costing $250 billion in today’s money, left few major cities unaffected and people across the country poured into the streets, occupying public spaces and construction zones for weeks. Highway protest songs played on sympathetic radio stations. Highway planners were forced to find new routes, neighborhoods were saved. White neighborhoods, specifically, equipped with both economic and political power. A decade before the Voting Rights Act, non white neighborhoods were steamrolled, forced removal. Daring to resist risked imprisonment and a place on the chain gangs that were enlisted to pave over their destroyed neighborhoods. In his study of how highways affected Black neighborhoods nationwide, historian Mark T. Evans writes, “most often, highway planners constructed through black neighborhoods because they presented little, if any, opposition. Building through black communities allowed planners to actualize the holy grail of road construction; they achieved the most cost-effective route and enjoyed minimal resistance. The fact that they also allowed some public officials to realize a vision of urban space that was racially segregated made them too good an opportunity to pass.”8
This is how segregation became structural. At the very moment that segregation was being dismantled in courts, it was being solidified in concrete, built into the infrastructure of cities across the country, and embedding a racial segregation that is only getting worse since the 90s, not better.9 In many cases it was preemptive, the highway paved the way for white flight to newly created and federally subsidized whites-only suburbs. In other cases it was punitive, targeting the very people who dared to challenge the white power establishment. After Dr. King supported the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, I-85 was rerouted from going through an abandoned park and instead it was put right through his and other civil rights leaders’ neighborhood. Then Alabama named it the MLK Expressway.10
Evans notes that, “In some urban areas, new highways destroyed enough black homes to swing congressional districts; in other areas, the roads purposefully served as barriers physically separating communities.”11 But the city did not simply force people to move, there was a plan of where they’d be moved to. The destruction of Jackson Ward was championed for decades ahead of its actualization in 1956. Leading up to the arrival of the first bulldozers, the city was busy building public housing neighborhoods. After Gilpin (hidden behind I-95), there was Creighton (just on the county line) and Hillside (hidden in the industrial district). And throughout the construction of I-95, Richmond built Fairfield and Whitcomb (on top of a landfill), both of which opened the same year, followed by Mosby just four years later. Masses of people who lost everything in Jackson Ward were spread across the city into neighborhoods of small cement barracks. Repeatedly, across the country, “communities of color were cut off from developing downtown centers, and not just freeways but also refineries, landfills, and power plants were dumped in non-white areas labeled ‘sacrifice communities,’” writes the American Civil Liberties Union.12
This is why Gilpin has no fresh food. Walled in by railroad tracks, factories, and highways, Gilpin residents live 20 years less than people across the river in Westover Hills, a disparity worse than Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, New York, or Tulsa. This is why the local paper calls Gilpin “the city's most isolated and desperate neighborhood.”13 And it’s where kids are regularly gunned down in the street, though it rarely inspires mass protest. It’s also why the city is planning, yet again, to tear down the neighborhood and make room for a $400 million development that includes expensive apartments and a 115-room hotel - hence the bulldozers a few blocks away.14 And this is why the lady’s hat bothered me so much.
The projects are unlivable because they are not designed for people to spend their lives in. They’re supposed to be a subsidized transitional situation to something better (like the home and land ownership that was lost under an eight lane highway). Gilpin’s managing company says people stay between two and five years. Yet the very first resident of Creighton Court, who was 29 when she moved in, was still living there when the city decided to tear down her home (for a second time) in 2021. She was 98. Maybe she lives somewhere in the county now, where it seems everyone is getting moved to. For the first time in nearly a century, Richmond City is no longer majority Black.
The Hat
I finished up my unsolicited lecture and got down off my picnic table soapbox. As people dispersed, I went up to her and asked about the hat. She smiled proudly. Ten years back, she’d been apart of the team that Virginia hired to help Sabra build the largest hummus factory in the world, which they did in record time. Part of the lure was the local and state funding they receive, which so far has exceeded $3.5 million.15 The lady in the Sabra hat was proud of the jobs she brought to the area, jobs Gilpin residents might depend on.
I can’t say for sure that she knew nothing of the massacre. When it happened, some time in her 20s, it was all over American TVs and newspapers. A horrified international community decried it in unison. For the entire summer of 1982, Israel occupied and carpet bombed Beirut, targeting Palestinian exiles and refugees that had been promised safety there. American supersonic jets and tanks flattened high rise apartment buildings. Apparently everyone was a target. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed or displaced.
Historian Rashid Kahlidi, who himself lived in Beirut throughout the 1982 invasion and occupation, writes that this was the first time “the entirely positive image that Israel has assiduously cultivated in the West..was severely tarnished” since Israel’s founding in 1948. “For many weeks, the international media widely disseminated disturbing images of intense civilian suffering in besieged and bombarded Beirut, the first and only Arab capital to be attacked and then occupied by Israel in this way.”16 Yet even with the entire world against it, with the Israeli public holding mass protests over the invasion and Israeli reservists petitioning against serving, the carnage dragged on for months. The UN Security Council voted repeatedly for a ceasefire but again and again was stopped by US vetoes.17 Sounds like what we continue to see today. The Reagan Administration used the veto in support of Israel six times that year, so far Biden has used it three times. Injustice in Palestine has long exposed the limitations and biases of the international tools like the United Nations.
But it was after the fighting officially stopped in late summer, after the international community finally stepped in, after four long months, to stop Israel’s endless bombings. It was after every last surviving Palestinian fighter was gathered up and marched onto a fleet of ships to be exiled, yet again, to lands even farther away from home. After the remaining Palestinian refugees, their friends and familes, were left defenseless. That’s when Israel did the unthinkable. For a day and a half, in September of 1982, the Israeli Occupation Forces surrounded two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and facilitated the massacre of between three and four thousand people. It seemed the entire world knew the name of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre.
The Dip
Well it was not long after the massacre, back in a small Brooklyn warehouse, that a young taxi driver who’d recently left Israel started producing a Palestinian cultural staple which he passed off as Israeli: hummus. The thing is that the Zionist project known as Israel requires the complete erasure of Palestinians and stealing land, lives, and livelihoods does not alone erase a people. So Israel also steals Palestinian cultural identities. Chickpeas have been cultivated by Palestinians for millennia and hummus is simply what the legume is called in Arabic. It was within this context that Sabra hummus was created.
To solidify his claim on the food, the taxi driver planted a metaphorical flag on it. The original name of the company was Sabra-Blue and White Foods, a proud patriotic stance bright enough to distract from the memories of Israeli flags outside of a different Sabra just four years earlier. It was a food of the conquered sold under the flag of the conquerer, and it would become, for Israel’s biggest supporters in North America and Europe, the very definition of hummus.
Sabra, today, is run jointly between PepsiCo and Israel’s Strauss Foods, a common Israel-US collaboration. At the same time that Sabra was breaking ground on its multi-record breaking factory out in Chesterfield county there was an international call to boycott Strauss Foods. The company was proudly funding one of Israel’s most notorious military groups, the Golani Brigade, which started out as an extremist militia before being enlisted to carry out Israel’s original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Behind the apartheid walls, the group brutalizes Palestinians, adding to the thousands of Palestinians held without charge in Israeli military jails, and some customers don’t want to fund that.
The Boycotts
The Strauss boycott might be part of why PepsiCo is now moving to buy out the company, adopting Sabra as a fully American brand and safe from the condemnation for being connected to Israel. It’s a testament to the power of boycotts. When racist governments have refused to budge, like Apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow US, it was collective boycotting that forced change. It’s why a defeated Alabama tore down Dr. King’s home.
But it is also why the BDS movement (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) against the Israeli occupation is so popular and thus has been so heavily targeted. International support for Israel’s occupation has been waning since Sabra and Shatila, and the BDS movement has pushed the discourse into US households. Since the start of the BDS campaign, Israel has lobbied hard to pass laws throughout the US that ban pro-Palestine protest, ghostwriting bills and funding candidates that support them. In the last two decades, 293 anti-BDS bills have been introduced and anti-BDS laws have been enacted in 38 states.18 Virginia has introduced eight such bills is an many years and has already passed HB 1606 which makes protest of the Zionist government hate speech, “falsely conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel,” and “is routinely employed to silence students, scholars, and community advocates who speak about Palestinian rights.”19 Twenty years of such moves set the stage for last summer, when Marco Rubio joined republicans from Louisiana, Indiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Montana to introduce a bill that criminalizes BDS on the federal level. Rubio called the BDS movement “the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare” against Israel.20 He’s not wrong.
Meanwhile Sabra hummus is the official dip of the National Football League. It makes sense: in the same way that the NFL flourishes despite fans knowing brain injuries are on the rise and that brain-damaged players struggle with suicide in their 30s, the legacy of the word Sabra, which came to the world with horrendous headlines of slaughtered children, does little to make shoppers question their purchase.
The Sabra-NFL sponsorship is the corporate embodiment of two settler colonies as best friends: blue and white supports red, white, and blue. And it fits neatly into the legacy of Israel’s unmatched relationship with the US, which is often obfuscated as “a special relationship” or phrased in some form of “Israel is our biggest ally in the Middle East.” Israel provides a European state in the Arab world, a place for the US to build bases for their forever wars in the oil rich region (the US operates in three bases inside Israel), accessing the very fossil fuels that made I-95 and the destruction of Jackson Ward profitable. And as a result, Israel receives unquestioned assistance to the tune of $4 billion a year in military aid and endless support for the occupation, such as the unparalleled US-Israel Free Trade Agreement. In response to the economy-crippling boycotts imposed on Israel from the Arab world and beyond, following the swell of the Nixon Administration neoliberal fervor, the US went against its guiding star of free market fundamentalism to sign the world’s first free trade agreement with Israel. In this lopsided arrangement enacted to eliminate all tarrifs and quotas on Israeli industrial products, the US hands Israel upwards of $8 billion in annual trade deficits, for over 40 years. It was approved by the House with a unanimous vote of 422-0.21 As a result, in 2014, the US imported $23 billion in Israeli goods, $9.4 billion in diamonds alone, a stone nonexistent in Middle Eastern subsoil.
Sabra sponsoring the NFL is the corporate version of co-signing America, but the fighter jet flyover during halftime rings a little different when followed by stolen-hummus commercials and Robert Kraft-funded propaganda about hostages. So when President Biden refers to Palestinians as “the other team” or “the opposition”, Americans are permitted to root against them. Yes, an illegal hit on the football field is dangerous, maybe a little immoral, but it’s expected, it gives the game some flair. Injury is an accepted part of football if you’re a fan, just like war crimes have become an accepted part of war if you’re an ally. Both go down better with dip.
The Lady
She shouldn’t have been there. It was bad enough that people thought posting about volunteering at a garden in the projects was anything near the reparations necessary to prevent police murders of Black folk. But her presence was especially troubling. The context left out of the headlines about world records and new jobs is that millions of the subsidy dollars that Virginia has given the Sabra factory came from a jobs program funded with the same limited pot of money that Gilpin residents depend on for rent relief. The same pot that just dried up while more than half the public housing residents across Richmond are late on rent.
She looked up from our conversation, becoming again lost in her thoughts. As she scanned the surrounding neighborhood, noted the dilapidated buildings and heard gentrification’s heavy machinery running just beyond our sight, her pride turned to dismay. “It wouldn’t be so bad here if they just cleaned up after themselves.” I said nothing.
For a moment, her words left me stiff with fear. I realized where she had been gazing this whole time. Just beyond the bulldozers, a jackhammer banged, and a dump truck roared. A freight train kicked up dust as it flew past us, while 18 wheelers soared down 95, sonic booming in every direction. My chest shook. My ears rang. My knees nearly buckled. I felt closed in, surrounded. Her crimson hat was dyed in fresh blood. I stared in disbelief. And everyone was eternally silent.
Now she was the one uncomfortable. Everyone else had dissipated while we spoke, and so in realizing she could not confide in us her true feelings, she found herself alone in a space that was not hers. At least not yet. Without saying another word she turned away, grabbed her things and left. She got halfway to her car before my heart rate slowed again. I watched as she left the neighborhood and got on the highway that would take her home to somewhere quiet, with a lot more shade and even more resources. She never did come back again, not that I saw. It was probably the end of her BLM career. Alex and I gathered the tools and loaded up the car before getting on that same highway that took us home too.
The Israeli Sabra
Zionists will be quick to argue that Sabra hummus has nothing to do with mass murder because the word has a completely different meaning for people who live in Israel. Sabra is a proud name, a patriotic hero. Sabra is the Anglo version of Tzabar, the word for “native-born Israeli Jews”. No longer an immigrant coming to colonize Palestine, Sabra patriotically claims to be native. Unlike the Jew who migrated to live as part of a religious constellation in Palestine, Sabras fought to turn Palestine into a Jewish-only Israel. They identify exclusively with the privileged class of the apartheid state which enables the genocide of Palestinians. And if Sabras are native, what to do with indigenous Palestinians? They have to move.
So the Americanization of Sabra hummus, the NFL sponsorship and PepsiCo buyout, the factory campus on 49 acres of Chesterfield farmland that produces two million pounds of stolen Palestinian heritage every week,22 represents the full adoption of Zionism as part of American patriotism. And this is what the lady wore on her head when she came to clean up the tattered remains of a safe haven.
The Genocide
As I write, more than 5% of Gaza’s population has been killed or injured since October, and half have been made houseless. Bombs are still falling and families are still shot down while searching for food. Last week, in what’s being called the Flour Massacre, nearly a thousand people were killed or wounded, shot with tank artillery, as they gathered for a rare delivery of flour. It is a genocide, no doubt, that is unfolding.
But the genocide is not only the explosions, the gore, the severed arms and organs spilled on the pavement. Those are horrendous acts of mass murder. The genocide is in the intention. Beyond the January ruling of the International Court of Justice that there has been genocidal intent since Israel’s invasion in October, there is genocidal intention in the very structural design of Palestinian life. It’s the apartheid walls and separated highways, the full control of everyone and everything that enters or leaves, the control of land, water, and air assets, the checkpoints, the military jails, the constant surveillance, and the Israeli weapons factories that are just miles away from where they are to be field tested.23 It is the powerlessness of international bodies to do anything to hold Israel to account, like the 2004 ICJ ruling to dismantle the apartheid wall, which has been blatantly ignored.
In so-called normal times, these structures embolden the armed settlers who carry out pogroms in the West Bank and the occupying snipers who target reporters and knee cap protestors. But these are not normal times, and we are watching the most explosive chapter yet in the Zionist take over: the complete removal of a people from the last bit of land they have, where they fled to survive Al Nakba. The Gaza Strip was once a safe haven.
It’s this genocidal structure and intention which permits the mass murders we see today. It permits the cutting off of food, water, and medicine and the blocking of all humanitarian aid. It allows Israel to flatten a country whilst openly marketing their next phase of land grab inside of Gaza. It’s often noted that if the US cut its military funding, Israel would not be able to afford its bombing campaigns. But if the US ended its lopsided trade agreements, let alone leveraged sanctions, the state would not be able to afford its violent expansion and costly apartheid infrastructure. As it is clear our government wants to continue both the occupation and the genocide, and that the international bodies invented to prevent such atrocities are not working, it is the masses who must engage in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions of any companies or institutions that support Israeli occupation. It is “the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare” that we have.
I need to be clear: the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the mass removals of Black Richmonders is not the same. Gaza’s borders are not an asphalt canyon built through neighborhoods, but instead a network of walls and checkpoints that splits the entire country, armed by motion activated machine guns, surveillance drones, and trigger-happy 18 year old settlers.
Still, the two are connected. Both share origins and motivations: European-developed states decide an oppressed and powerless population is a problem and thusly removes them. The U.S. Energy Information Administration tells us that it was 1948, the year of Al-Nakba, that marked a turning point in US crude oil imports, passing 100 million gallons that year, opening the floodgates to the eventual three billion gallons imported now.24 Truman recognized the creation of the state of Israel (just 11 minutes after it was announced), his successor approved the national highway.
Permission is built into the myth of the state’s right to exist: in the name of democracy and progress, the militarily strong is allowed to overrun the lives of the oppressed. Might makes right, as the saying goes. In this mythology, a survival of the fittest, ethnic cleansing is just an uncomfortable part of development. “Modernity elaborated a myth of its own goodness,” wrote the late Argentinian Mexican philosopher and theologian Enrique Dussel, “rationalized its violence as civilizing, and finally declared itself innocent of the assassination of the Other.” US public housing originated during a more egalitarian moment: when it was important to make sure people had housing. Yet, the systemic divestment and eventual destruction has led us to a segregation that needs no laws and a new policy tool for dealing with poverty: bulldozers. And the state finds itself innocent.
Sometimes I still believe that if people just had the right context, things would be different. It’s all around us, and maybe that’s what makes it easy to ignore. The segregation in our own towns, the hemming in of peoples into prison-like conditions and well known food scarcities amongst millions, that has allowed us to become comfortable with apartheid - that keeps us silent and complicit in genocide. But for those of us inside the US, it is our genocide to stop. And with every day that Israel is allowed to continue, we not only embolden them to cross more red lines, bomb more hospitals and starve more people, but we also allow the strong arms of US global oppression to become ever more fierce and uncheckable. American protestors are silenced by Israeli laws and brutalized by Israel field-tested weapons. The horrors we export inevitably come back home.
We need an immediate and permanent ceasefire, but that is just the minimum and it was needed in October. Now the world must deal, urgently and completely, with the famine Israel has set in motion. The occupation must end in its entirety, the apartheid apparatuses dismantled, Gaza rebuilt and Gazans and all Palestinians ensured the right to return home. After a ceasefire finally comes, there are a lot of actions that are going to be necessary, which Palestinians are already demanding and should be the ones listened to on the matter, not me. But se are going to have to rebuild the very infrastructure of the global community; international law did not prevent this, the ICJ could not stop it, the people cannot influence the US vetoes. The reparations need to include structural changes - perhaps they will be known as Palestine clauses - to make sure these international bodies of justice do what they are idealized and promised to do. It is not too late to make reparations, the State of Israel is younger than Gilpin Court.
All of this was planned. Intentional, not natural. Peace cannot be purposefully misunderstood as pacification. The world deserves a Free Palestine.
Evans, Mark T. “Main Street, America: Histories of I-95.” University of South Carolina - Columbia. 2015.
Alex and I lived in historic Jackson Ward for years and learned a lot from the long time residents. Not everything in this piece has an academic source because the stories of the elders who lived through this period are worth way more.
Campbell, Benjamin. Richmond's Unhealed History. 2012.
Allen, Greg. “Paying a Local Price for I-95’s Global Promise.” NPR. 2010. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129475747
Fernández, Jay A. “Racism by Design: The Building of Interstate 81.” ACLU. 2023. https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/racism-by-design-the-building-of-interstate-81
Johnson, Nathanael. “A Highway Runs Through It.” Grist. 2019. https://grist.org/cities/oakland-california-freeway-removal-interstate-980/
Evans, Mark T.
Evans, Mark T.
Semuels, Alana. “The U.S. is Increasingly Diverse, Why is Segregation Getting Worse?” TIME. 2021. https://time.com/6074243/segregation-america-increasing/
Fernández, Jay A.
Evans, Mark T.
Fernández, Jay A.
Slipek Jr., Edwin. “The Lost Neighborhood.” Style Weekly Magazine. November 2006. https://www.styleweekly.com/the-lost-neighborhood/
Lazarus, Jeremy M. “Gilpin Court community to undergo major change.” Richmond Free Press. 2022. http://m.richmondfreepress.com/news/2022/oct/20/gilpin-court-community-undergo-major-change/
Via the Subsidy tracker on Good Jobs First.org: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/sabra-dipping-company
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years War on Palestine. 2020. pp 164.
Neff, Donald. “Begin’s Admissions in 1982 That Israel Started Three Of Its Wars.” Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs. July 1994. https://www.wrmea.org/1994-july-august/begin-s-admission-in-1982-that-israel-started-three-of-its-wars.html
Klein, Naomi. “We Have A Tool To Stop Israel’s War Crimes: BDS.” The Guardian. 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/only-outside-pressure-can-stop-israels-war-crimes?fbclid=PAAabVFkYi2Q1REYUVRwngI_9LNK0xg5527HheBS2vCFwaf5y19B23HAfF_3o_aem_AW3gJfmnZhi-nzZtMpNTJonpO7nCEdJm5chUzSHUZBVqXakwVb6XKrV9MYB3R0vqvcs
Oppose VA HB 1606 Coalition Letter. February 2023. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/63ee6c0aeca9921bcd211ac1/1676569610715/Oppose+VA+HB+1606_Coalition+Letter.pdf
“Rubio, Colleagues Reintroduce Legislation to Combat Anti-Israel BDS Campaign.” Press Release. May 2023.
Rosen, Howard. “Free Trade Agreements as Foreign Policy Tools: The U.S.-Israel and U.S.-Jordan FTAs.” Institute for International Economics. https://www.piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/375/03iie3616.pdf
“Virginia and Sabra Partner on World’s Largest Hummus Facility.” Case Study. Virginia Economic Development Partnership. https://www.vedp.org/case-study/virginia-and-sabra-partner-worlds-largest-hummus-facility
Dowling, Paddy. “The Dirty Secret of Israel’s Weapon Exports: They are Tested on Palestinians.” Al Jazeera. 2023. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab
Data collected from US Energy Information Administration. Retrieved Feb. 2024. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRIMUS1&f=M