Photojournalist Mohammed Asad sends photos from New Year’s eve in Gaza.

Alan Dershowitz gave Keith Ellison’s campaign to become DNC chair its largest boost in weeks when told the Fox Business Network, “If they appoint Keith Ellison to be chairman of the Democratic Party, I will resign my membership to the Democratic Party after 50 years of being a loyal Democrat.”

Language matters because it impacts how we think of reality. Nada Elia’s New Year’s Resolution, which she hopes millions of others will also make, is to stop substituting “the occupation” for “Zionism.” She writes, “The era of discussing the occupation as the presumed greater Israeli evil is over, and should be tossed into the trash heap of history. As we celebrate the discursive change around Palestine, we must be cautious no longer to speak or write about “the occupation” except as one of the many varied facets of Zionism. Palestinians cannot afford any more erasures, as these are extremely detrimental to our cause, to justice. And just as we realize that the two-state “solution” was never a viable option, we must also inscribe into our new discourse that the occupation was never the problem. Zionism is.”

Netanyahu’s most impressive achievement is that he has associated his politics and even himself personally with sacred Jewish history and its hallowed lessons. That is why Jimmy Carter and now John Kerry must be vilified for pointing out the apartheid treatment of Palestinians. Netanyahu’s sacred construction is about to crash to the ground. Jeffrey Goldberg has already jumped ship.

Muckraking journalist George Seldes said it best: “The truth is not in the commercial media because the truth is a dagger pointed at its heart, which is its pocketbook.” Today is the last time this year that we will ask for your donations to maintain and grow Mondoweiss’s independence and leadership in defining, documenting and strategizing resistance to injustice. (If you have already donated, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts!) Today we also follow the Mondoweiss tradition of ending each year by listing the year’s posts that received the most views. We present the top stories of the 1500+ published in 2016—a very diverse group. And this year our look back goes beyond a quantitative list to highlight the pieces that make us particularly proud.

UNSC resolution 2334 includes weaker language on Israeli settlements than prior UNSC resolutions which called for Israel to dismantle existing settlements and lacks a real enforcement mechanism. There is little reason to believe it will have a practical effect in halting and dismantling Israel’s settlement enterprise.

Question for John Kerry — You say the US has provided Israel the ‘protection of legitimacy’. Why does it need so much protection? Is it because the world hates it? Or is it because it actually enacts illegitimate policy?

An unnerving bunch, these Jewish public moralizers. Just when you think you’ve got their propaganda down pat, along comes a shift in U.S. power and they turn the whole game upside down. Remember when it was bad form to analogize Israel’s army of occupation to the Nazis? Well, that was then. Today it’s David Friedman, Donald Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Israel, who publicly accuses the liberal-Zionist Jews of J Street of being even worse “than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.”

Jihan Muhammad Hashimeh, 35, of occupied Issawiya, Jerusalem, was injured after being shot by Israeli soldiers at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem in the central occupied West Bank, for allegedly attempting to stab Israeli soldiers Friday morning.

In the NY Times lead story on the Kerry speech, writer David Sanger says Obama has distanced himself from Middle East peace negotiations, which he “doubted would succeed.” This is false and a jab at Kerry. The policy was Obama’s, and set in place with the Cairo speech of 2009.