Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran an article by National Library of Israel employee Gil Weissblei that refers to 1937 Palestine as “pre-state Israel”. An editor defends the choice, saying the photos in the story document the “embryonic” state of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected on the promise that Palestinians would never have their own independent state, and now even the most powerful pro-Israel organization in the U.S. appears to be changing its rhetoric on the two-state solution. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, scrubbed a reference to the two-state solution from talking points on its website.
The US government is backing a brutal war on Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. It has been for more than nine months. You wouldn’t know that from the US Palestinian solidarity movement though. It has largely remained silent.
Forty years ago the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 which declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” At the UN on November 11, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry forcefully condemned the resolution on its anniversary. In his 2,500-word statement, Kerry mentioned Palestinians just once, Power did not mention Palestinians at all.
“Every week we fear a demolition is going to be done in the village. Always people live in fear. Always.” Ben Norton talks with a delegation of seven Palestinians from the West Bank villages of Um al-Kheir and Susiya who traveled to Washington DC to build support among US politicians to prevent the demolition of their villages.
The Saudi-led, US-backed coalition killed 131 civilians, including at least 80 women, after bombing a wedding in Yemen on September 28. A representative of Doctors Without Borders said there was no military presence near the wedding. This attack marks the deadliest day in the war in Yemen, which has now gone on for over half a year.
Danny Danon, Israel’s new ambassador to the United Nations, boasted on his official Facebook page on April 27, 2011 that he was proposing legislation that would have the Israeli government “annex the West Bank and repeal the Oslo Accords.” The Facebook post was deleted sometime on or after August 28, 2015—after Netanyahu had appointed him Israel’s ambassador to the UN. While he can delete past Facebook posts, there is some evidence Danon’s radical right-wing politics that he cannot expunge.
The leading human rights organization Amnesty International says the killing of the 18-year-0ld Palestinian Hadeel al-Hashlamoun three days ago by Israeli soldiers was an “extrajudicial execution.”
The Steering Committee of the United Church of Christ Palestine-Israel Network strongly condemned the cancellation of Reverend Graylan Hagler’s “From Ferguson to Palestine” talk at the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, NY after pro-Israel groups pressured the divinity school to cancel Rev. Hagler’s talk.
Reverend Graylan Hagler, a veteran civil rights activist and outspoken supporter of Palestinian human rights, was invited by the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and Rochester, NY Friends of Sabeel Chapter to speak about Palestine on September 24. Mere days before he was going to travel to upper New York state for the talk, the divinity school disinvited Hagler following pressure from Christians United for Israel.