We must admit we are living in the golden age of Jewish anti-Zionism. A young Maine director, Eric Axelman, is doing a film about the American Jewish responsibility for the occupation. US Jews have the “magic stick” to change Israel, a Palestinian tells him.
“No one in our family was ever as passionate about Israel as me, and now I’m the most critical.” Liz Rose meditates on her summer in 1986, at the Alexander Muss High School, when she fell in love with Jerusalem.
What is meant by Palestine having, or having not, ‘existed’? Humans have lived and died in the region we call Palestine for about as long as our species has walked the earth, regardless of who had the biggest club, the grandest throne, or the most F16s. Palestine includes regions that are among the longest inhabited on earth.
Why I chose to avoid Gilad Atzmon’s questions about a Jewish global conspiracy. Like this one: “Can you imagine a peace loving Jewish political existence?”
There is no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of Israel than Russia. But if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.
Ongoing clashes have erupted across the occupied West Bank on Friday, with several Palestinians injured, on what Palestinians are calling the Day of Rage — initially called for by the Fatah movement — in support of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners who entered the 12th day of a mass hunger strike on Friday.
A religious freedom watchdog mandated by Congress rebuffed repeated appeals from Christian Palestinians to investigate Israel and “bullied” sympathetic officials into dropping their cause, said outgoing member to the committee for religious liberties James Zogby on Wednesday.
Ron Fox, a 77-year-old Jewish Democrat in Mass., urges the party’s state committee to condemn Israeli settlements: “For 45 years, not a day has gone by that I have not thought about human rights violations caused by settlements.”
When Israeli soldiers carried her novel in one hand and a gun in the other into Gaza in 2014, trying to kill “bad guys,” that was all that a writer could ask for her work, Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan says in New York, in a tour sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Zeena Ismail says the call to support hunger striking Palestinian prisoners is a call to support humanity: “I could write a brief history recap on the conflict, but in all honesty, there is plenty out there for one to educate themselves about the topic without bias and with reason. This is why I will refrain from making a case for these prisoners simply because they already have the strongest case, the case of being human and wanting to be treated as one.”
Abbas does not represent Palestinian youth, say young writers in Gaza. “We, the people of Gaza, are the children, but the fighting couple, Hamas and Fatah, are not keeping us out of it. Instead, each is using us as a tool to pressure the other into giving up.”
Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, is secret financial partners with what was once the richest family in Israel — the billionaire Steinmetzes, whose leading figure has been linked to a massive bribery scandal in Africa. Kushner’s hidden business ties, just revealed in the New York Times and Bloomberg, should prompt the same intense scrutiny that other Trump officials have gotten for their secret links to Russia.
Writing in Haaretz, John Brown asks: “800 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli and PA security forces as a result of a computerized program that tries to predict lone-wolf attacks based on social media posts. But how can you jail someone for a crime they haven’t committed?”
Why do you draw Israeli soldiers? an Israeli soldier asked cartoonist Mohammad Saba’aneh when he searched his suitcase at the Jordanian border. Because look around, that is all I see, Saba’aneh responded. He has just published a book of cartoons and is on an American tour.
A leading New York rabbi says that Jewish Voice for Peace has “hearts of stone, Jewishly cold, lifeless and emptied of Jewish feeling,” and says the group’s statements on terrorism “would make Osama bin Laden blush,” and that they also seem to approve Bashar al-Assad. The April 7 sermon by an excited Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a sign of how rocked the Jewish community is today by the threat of anti-Zionism and the boycott movement, BDS.
Israeli socialists have long argued that the primary agent for change in Palestine is the Israeli-Jewish (Hebrew) working class which must be tempted into abandoning the advantages that it presently enjoys, or perceives that it enjoys, in a Zionist state based on Jewish supremacy. Tony Greenstein counters that until Zionism is defeated socialism will be off the agenda in Israel and the Middle East. Zionism and the idea of a Jewish nation are the guarantee against any unity between the Jewish and Arab working classes.
Artists for Palestine UK send an open letter to the rock band Radiohead about their upcoming concert in Tel Aviv: “Please do what artists did in South Africa’s era of oppression: stay away, until apartheid is over.”
Zionist intention is to gather Jews from around the world to support and live in the “Jewish State,” using the idea of Jewish unsafety. I cannot be this Jew. As a refugee [from Nazi Germany], I identify with the homeless displaced Palestinians.
Students at Fordham University filed a lawsuit against the school over its refusal to grant club status to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The students argue that the denial is “viewpoint discrimination” in violation of Fordham’s policies regarding free expression. “As a Palestinian on campus, I was denied the opportunity to advocate for freedom for my people,” said Ahmad Awad, a graduating Fordham student. “Instead of encouraging our human rights advocacy, the university sided with those trying to silence our voices.”
Being anti-occupation but pro-Israel hasn’t worked out well for J Street. Abba Solomon relates a historical parallel: when the then-anti-Zionist American Jewish Committee helped support the Jewish Agency in 1924 and was promptly overwhelmed by Zionists.
Duaa Ardat describes recent clashes in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, “News reports said a battle had broken out between the Fatah movement and a mysterious extremist named Bilal Badr and his followers. Many people were fleeing the camp under the hail of the shelling; others were stuck in their homes, afraid of being hit by random shots. The Lebanese media call Ein El-Helweh the “zone without laws,” but it is home to more than 100,000 people (about half of whom are Palestinian).”
Aarab Marwan Barghouti, the son of jailed Palestinian official Marwan Barghouti who is leading a hunger strike of more than 1,500 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons, gave a boost to prisoner solidarity campaigns by releasing a video of him drinking a bitter mixture of salt and water. The clip closes by asking others to participate in his “salt water challenge” in solidarity with the Palestinian hunger strikers.
After overcoming multiple legal and administrative hurdles, including an Israeli-imposed travel ban, Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, appeared on a panel at Columbia University last night entitled “The Road to Freedom: The BDS Movement for Palestinian Rights and the Struggle Against Apartheid.” Barghouti listed BDS’ many accomplishments since its launch in 2005 by Palestinian civil society and his commentary was sharp and at times funny. “BDS cannot claim full responsibility for Israel’s growing academic, cultural and increasingly economic isolation” Barghouti said. “For Israel itself deserves a big share of the credit.”
The federal government has dropped the charges against AMP [American Muslims for Palestine] staffers Taher Herzallah and Kareem El-Hosseiny who were arrested along with four others protesting the Senate confirmation hearing of David Friedman, the ambassador to Israel.
Nearly 100 Israelis sign onto an open letter endorsing Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike.