A masked Israeli settler attacked an Israeli-American rabbi and co-founder of the group Rabbis for Human Rights, taking knife to the religious leader and peace activist’s neck, this afternoon following an annual olive harvest in the West Bank village of Awarta outside of Nablus.
On Thursday, October 15 during Kate Snow Live, MSNBC aired a segment on the present violence in Israel/Palestine. Amazingly, it presented the four-map graphic about Palestinian land loss. Predictably, a firestorm of anger and invective was immediately directed at MSNBC. None of it was justified, but the pro-Israel lobby relies on brute force and not truth or logic in order to intimidate journalists and politicians. On Thursday October 19, both Snow and Fletcher issued an apology for presenting the map graphic and for their remarks.
JK Rowling has staked out territory as a prominent face of the anti-BDS movement. She’s signed on to a heavily publicized open letter in the Guardian, “Israel needs cultural bridges, not boycotts”, encouraging “dialogue about Israel and the Palestinians” in a “wider” cultural and creative community. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) responds: “Some British cultural figures, including known Israel apologists, seem intent to revive Thatcher’s ‘constructive engagement’, equating the colonisers with the colonised, which in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa proved to be downright unethical and complicit.”
Given the Jewish Week’s powerful reach into mainstream Jewish households – the paper has reported 100,000 weekly subscribers in the New York area (making it the single biggest-circulation Jewish periodical) – its commentary on the growing violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories carries significant weight. Alas, the Jewish Week’s most recent summary of events, while ostensibly expressing sympathy for victims of “terror,” confounds its subject matter so completely that, in the end, it succeeds only in propagandizing for systematic violence, defending international crime, and embracing disinformation as an instrument of justice.
There are varying explanations for the uptick in violence in Israel-Palestine over the past few days, but one explanation that appears to have caught on with the Israeli government and much Western media, according to Duke University cultural anthropologist Rebecca Stein, is incitement through social media. As she notes, the word occupation is nowhere to be found in this new narrative.
As Netanyahu’s Holocaust revisionism continues to find its way around the world, Jewish memory is besmirched. That’s the consensus of the many Holocaust historians and political figures that continue to weigh in on Netanyahu’s misreading of Holocaust history. Buried in the outrage, though, is a deeper issue: Rather than the historical details of Holocaust history, how the Holocaust functions in relation to Palestine is the issue at hand. Netanyahu’s misreading of the Holocaust pales in significance to how the Holocaust is used to strengthen Israel at the cost of Palestinian life.
On Friday, October 16th, Israeli soldiers again opened fire across the Gaza border on Palestinian youth demonstrators. Amid the chaos, some protesters came across a leaking freshwater pipe and were able to quench their thirst. Even though they quickly realized a tear gas canister fired by Israeli soldiers was floating in the water, some were undeterred by the presence of noxious chemicals and drank the water anyway. Dan Cohen says that while this video is not the most shocking piece of footage he captured that day, it might be the most instructive.
Israeli police and barking dogs woke Abdallah and Fatima Abu Nab from inside of the couple’s bedroom shortly after daybreak Monday morning, and told them to immediately and permanently leave their house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, bringing an end to an seven-year legal battle with Israeli settlers. This latest Israeli provocation took place in the heart of East Jerusalem where more than 40 Palestinians, and eight Israelis have been killed in shootings and attacks since the start of October.
Last week, MSNBC aired a map showing the loss of Palestinian land to Zionist settlers and then to Israel from 1946 to the present. Following criticism from Israelis and their supporters, MSNBC apologized and stated that the map was incorrect. But was it? Here is a fact check of MSNBC’s map and the criticisms of it.
On NPR’s “On Point,” Tom Ashbrook pairs Gerald Steinberg, the rightwing director of NGO Monitor, with Sayed Kashua the Palestinian writer. That’s like pairing an evolutionary biologist with a slick spokesperson for intelligent design.