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April 2017

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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.

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.

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.”

Abba Solomon finds a historical parallel between a recent “misadventure” at an anti-BDS conference where members of J Street attended and were called “anti-Semitic” by a speaker from the stage, and “the American Jewish Committee (AJC) [who] felt it must cooperate with the Zionist movement, in order to be within the tent when decisions were made. It participated in the formation of the Jewish Agency for Palestine on the understanding the Agency would be a joint Zionist/non-Zionist enterprise.”

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).”