Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak bemoans that the left is not sufficiently represented in celebrations of Israel’s 1967 occupation and settlement. He brags about all the leading “left” wing politicians and generals who acted to “liberate” those territories for Jews.
Yossi Gurvitz recounts how he went from growing up in a national-religious family in Petah Tikva to rejecting Judaism. For him, it all started in yeshiva: “On October 28th, 1984, I had my first crisis of faith. That evening, David Ben Shimol – an IDF soldier – fired a stolen anti-tank rocket into a Palestinian bus as vengeance for an earlier Palestinian terror attack. Every evening we had a seder erev, which began punctually and without fail at 19:10. That evening, for the first and only time I was in Nechalim, it was postponed. So that people could have time enough to dance.”
The United States denied entry this week to a well-known runner from the occupied West Bank, shattering his dream of competing in the Chicago Marathon. “They’ve really ruined this dream by stopping me from having the chance to run in the US,” Mohammad Alqadi tells Mondoweiss.
David Lloyd writes: “Palestinian steadfastness, and in particular the non-violent persistence that daily affirms their determination to stay on their land, is the quiet negation of Israel’s racial regime. As I sat in the Hebron twilight listening to Issa Amro’s calm and confident voice after a long and dismaying day witnessing the sheer ugliness of occupation and settlement, I knew that he would not be going away. He and Youth Against Settlement will persist against all the odds, however long the struggle for justice may take.”
Yoav Litvin reviews Moshe Menuhin’s “Not by Might, nor by Power”: The Zionist betrayal of Judaism” a ground-breaking critique of Zionism first published in 1965. Litvin writes, “In ‘Not by Might, nor by Power,’ Menuhin dissects the crimes and fallacies inherent within Zionism and obliterates its propagandized selling points, while maintaining his love for his version of Jewish identity.”
Trump’s policy on Iran may be driven by three Israel-loving donors, Adelson, Singer, and Marcus, but it is verboten in Washington to identify the Israel lobby as the main adversary of the Iran deal, especially in the wake of the Phil Giraldi/Valerie Plame uproar, which has fueled the neoconservative claim that the antiwar left is anti-semitic.
Israel should stop threatening Lebanon because it could lead to war in which many thousands would die for no reason. And Israel faces no real threat from Hezbollah. The Israeli bellicosity is the product of Israeli paranoia: primal Jewish fear of annihilation that is illogical under the circumstances.
Anyone who believes that Israel’s occupation of Palestine can last forever must read Zohra Drif’s memoir of the Algerian war for independence. Drif was a 22-year-old law student in 1956, when she left a bomb in a milk bar. Her account is a vital addition to a sparse literature: the Algerian side of the 1954-62 war for independence, in which up to one million Algerians died before France was forced to leave its colony.
Elor Azarya had “endured a lot”, said an Israeli military spokesman, announcing Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s decision to cut four months off the soldier-medic’s already lenient 18-month sentence for killing a wounded, immobile Palestinian alleged attacker by a bullet to the head at point blank on the street in Hebron in 2016.
Are the moves by Fatah and Hamas towards new elections and a unity government a genuine push for strengthened Palestinian governance, or simply a strategy by faltering politicians to stay in power?