Abed was only 15 years old when he was awoken late one night by a masked Israeli soldier standing over his bed pointing a rifle at him. “Wake up Habibti (my darling),” the soldier said, shortly before he blindfolded and handcuffed Abed tightly behind his back. This was the start of an ordeal that this child and his family endured when he was arrested in the middle of the night, taken to an undisclosed location, harshly interrogated and imprisoned on the suspicion of stone throwing. This grim scenario is played out in hundreds of homes each year across the West Bank. To bring attention to this horrific aspect of the Israeli occupation, the No Way to Treat a Child Campaign and the American Friends Service Committee will hold a Congressional Briefing on June 2.

A young Palestinian, Baraa Kalaid Madhun, 16, of Hebron is suspected of throwing stones at an Israeli occupying military base. Soldiers have told him that if he leaves his house between 6 PM and 11 AM they will break his legs. And if no stones are thrown in the next 30 days, they say it will be proven that he did so.

Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolph Eichmann is controversial to this day because it sees evil in his actions not in his underlying motivation; and Zionists are especially critical because they insist on the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Europe, as a basis for the necessity of the Jewish state

The American Jewish community is in crisis over Israel. Some support the state, others are sharply critical. The community used to be able to marginalize the critics, but now it is splitting, and a debate is beginning that will transform American politics of the issue.

What Obama outlined in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg and speech to Adas Israel on Friday is a principled defense of the liberal Zionist two-state-solution that the United States has endorsed and has been advocating for the past 22 years.

Shachar Berrin, IDF soldier of 19, is going to prison for a week because during the public filming of a television program on May 14, he spoke about the widespread racism he has seen among Israeli occupation forces. He recalled an incident in which an Israeli soldier told fellow IDF troops to stop harassing Christian tourists because “come on, they are people, not Palestinians.”

The Soviet spy Kim Philby escaped detection twice in the 1950s and what did him in in the end? He criticized Israel as a writer in Beirut for the Economist and the Observer, and an ardent Zionist informed on him to British authorities. And the American reviewers of a book that tells the story leave that angle out.

President Obama’s speech to Adas Israel Congregation in Washington yesterday had an air of entitlement. Pandering to alleged liberals at this synagogue, he gets laughter for saying that Palestinians are “not the easiest of partners” and applause for completely ignoring the Nakba and every act of Israeli violence from 1948 to the present.

Over a dozen writers arrive in Ramallah from different parts of the world this week to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature, a traveling roadshow that puts on public literary events featuring Palestinian and visiting writers in different cities in the evenings