I’m hopeful that this is too big a moment for some westerners to turn back to complicit persecution. I’m hopeful that the long Palestinian spirit of sumud, or steadfastness, is an infectious spirit.
As Israel’s kill-count in Gaza tops 12,000, including 5,000 children, Biden sinks further into a “moral abyss,” calling this a war for “democracy.” Our leaders are cracking down on opposition to the war, and trying to push the story under the carpet. But consciousness is rising in the Democratic base, including vigorous antiwar demonstrations.
Since October 7, there have been five elements that indicate we may be seeing a paradigm shift in the hundred years’ war waged against the Palestinian people.
Jewish thinkers have long warned that Israel’s dependence on western Jews’ political support to gain impunity for its human rights abuses could contribute to antisemitism in the U.S. and even make Jews’ lives “precarious.”
Listen to a Palestine Festival of Literature event held on November 1 featuring Michelle Alexander, Rashid Khalidi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Natalie Diaz, Noura Erakat and Mohammed El-Kurd speaking out against the Israeli assault on Gaza.
September 29 marks 100 years since Britain was assigned the role of Mandatory Power in Palestine. Despite a hundred years of bloody conflict and grief, the international community’s obligation to decolonize Palestine continues today.
New evidence reveals that US plans to build an embassy in Jerusalem would place the diplomatic compound on privately-owned Palestinian land that was confiscated from its owners by Israel, following the Nakba and the establishment of the state in 1948.
This month marks the 39th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre. Ellen Siegel, now 79 and a retired nurse in Washington, D.C., talks to Steve France about what happened to her in 1982, when she was working as a volunteer nurse at the hospital in the Shatila neighborhood of Beirut: “The soldiers’ rifles were pointed at us. Some of my fellow hospital staff started crying. I wondered, was anyone going to know that I died in this refugee camp?”
The United Church of Christ resolution abandoning the two-state solution and calling Israel’s continued “oppression” of Palestinians a “sin” that demands action by people of faith has alarmed the American Jewish Committee and for good reason: Other Protestant churches are sure to follow, with measures that pose a real threat to apartheid.
Don’t look now, but mainstream Democrats are defying Israel over the Gaza attack. Chuck Schumer calls for a cease fire, joining 30 other Senators, and Gregory Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for a hold on a $735 million sale of missiles and bombs to Israel that the White House approved May 5 — till he backed down today. But liberal Zionist J Street group is for all military aid continuing to flow to Israel.