The first few hours of Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing have been sickening. I thought he was named to be United States Secretary of Defense, not Israel’s defense. The most urgent questions were about Israel, and many came from liberal Democrats insisting that Hagel is pledged to going to war against Iran if it acquires a […]
A long and highly-favorable Jeffrey Goldberg profile in the Washingtonian Magazine portrays Goldberg as hilarious and aggressive, a little bit juvenile–but lovable– and the most powerful Jewish journalist in the U.S. At one level, the piece is about the Jewish establishment and a Washington guild of insider Jewish journalists. Author Paul Starobin informs us that […]
How long does it typically take university students to get to their morning lectures where you live? It might just be a matter of whether they decide to walk, cycle or take the bus. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for Palestinian students in the West Bank who continue to face incredible difficulties in accessing education […]
It was a bright and early start for everyone on the team as it takes roughly two hours in the saveese to snake up through the Samarian hills and reach Jenin from down town Ramallah. We were given a warm welcome from a full class of young people at the Sharek centre in Jenin. They […]
IDF soldiers at the border with Lebanon in November 2005. (Photo: Efi Sharir/AFP/Le Monde) Late Tuesday evening Israeli planes bombed a weapons convoy in Syria destined for Lebanon, marking Israel’s military entry into the now two-year crisis in Syria. Earlier Israeli officials announced they would strike Syria if the embattled Bashar al-Assad lost control over […]
(Photo: Reuters) A U.N. fact-finding mission into “the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory” has issued a blockbuster report (PDF) on the Israeli settlement project warning of “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories and making the closest call […]
A Senate Armed Services staffer tells me that Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing will be livestreamed at this address tomorrow morning starting at 9:30. In the runup to the hearing, 112 pages of Hagel’s responses to “Advance Policy Questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee” have been released. The document includes no references to the peace […]
Muslims and allies rally in New York’s Foley Sq. against NYPD spying on Muslims (Photo: CAIR-NY/Flickr) Islamophobic subway ads, “stop and frisk” and the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) surveillance program–what’s the connection? Activists and experts spoke out last night to make explicit the links between all of these seemingly separate strands of discrimination in […]
On February 3rd and 4th, 2013, Palestinian activist Iyad Burnat will culminate his United States speaking tour with three public events in Washington, DC that narrate personal stories of life in the occupied West Bank and outline strategies for non-violent popular resistance to the Israeli occupation. This is a crucial moment in the Palestinian struggle […]
The Brooklyn College Political Science department has released a statement defending an upcoming panel discussion on the BDS movement that has come under attack from Israel supporters including Alan Dershowitz. The February 7th event is being hosted by the Political Science department and will feature Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti. Efforts to cancel the event […]
Yesterday we reported on a panel discussion of boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel at Brooklyn College a week from tomorrow that is sponsored by the political science department and that is being attacked by Alan Dershowitz and other supporters of Israel. It appears that the panel– featuring Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti– will go […]
Today on the New York Times website, law professor George Bisharat makes the case for putting Israel in the dock at the International Criminal Court. Bisharat argues it would be an opportunity to put Israel’s own interpretation of international law to judicial review and in the process end Israeli impunity. From “Why Palestine Should Take […]
I think this is how the world works. PEN, the literary and human rights organization, has a new director, Suzanne Nossel. PEN says Nossel has “deep experience in the … human rights arena.” Certainly she has got the right wax on her skis. Just a year six months ago Nossel got the top job at […]
Land, property theft & destruction / Ethnic cleansing / Restriction of movement Watch: Palestinian steadfastness honored in short animation “The Kite That Caught a Mountain” EI 29 Jan — The Kite that Caught a Mountain, directed by Alexander Gaisie-Walker and James Altham, is a uniquely stylized portrayal of the literal machine of Israeli occupation and […]
I’m endlessly surprised by the New York Times. Today the paper assembles seven foreign-policy “debaters” to put forward questions for Chuck Hagel whose confirmation hearing as Secretary of Defense is tomorrow. And not one debater raises the Israel/Palestine issue! Israel is mentioned in relationship to Iran, but not in relationship to the occupation of Palestine […]
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink spoke at a New York panel on drone warfare. Here, she’s pictured protesting in August 2012 outside a building in Florida where drones are built. (Photo via PressTV) Surgical strikes, terrorists and high-level militants–those are the buzzwords most Americans are accustomed to thinking about when a conversation turns to drone […]
UN Human Rights Council Yesterday, Israel refused to attend a United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) review of its human rights record becoming the first country ever to boycott the Universal Periodic Review process. Under this process, all 193 member states of the United Nations take part in a regular review of its human rights record. […]
There has been a lot of “bad news” coming out of Israel for the last few years for apologists and pro-Israeli organizations to “explain”– hasbara is of course Hebrew for “explaining”– and then there is this story: Israel “coaxed,” or forced, birth control injections on Ethiopian women in transit camps to depress the Ethiopian birth […]
There’s an important discussion about Islamophobia tonight in New York, sponsored by the Jews Against Islamophobia Coalition. This is heroic work; we mentioned it a week back. From the press release: Challenging Islamophobia and Making Connections: Hate Speech, NYPD Surveillance, Stop and Frisk What: Representatives from organizations that combat Islamophobia and racism, and are concerned with […]
A psychiatry professor at Yale has gotten a $1.8 million grant from the Defense Department to open a center that will teach soldiers how to “read and question” people. Gee! Waterboarding 101. This is the kind of thing that used to spark protest and student strikes. No longer. A clueless report from the Yale Daily […]
Gerald Scarfe cartoon Jan. 27, 2013 Sunday Times After The Sunday Times of London published a cartoon of a scowling Netanyahu making peace by building a wall with bricks, blood, and bodies writhing in anguish on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, all hell broke loose. The cartoon by Gerald Scarfe carries the caption ‘Israeli Election–Will […]
A storm in New York: on February 7, Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler are scheduled to discuss the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement aimed at Israel in a forum at Brooklyn College, hosted by the Political Science Department. Well, the media and alumni are now engaged, including the famous Zionist alum, Alan Dershowitz, evidently to question […]
Lubna Munir Hanash, killed in Palestine Jan. 23, 2013 The Haaretz article excerpted below, published January 24, states that four unarmed Palestinians between the ages of 16 and 21 were killed the preceding week, and a fifth person’s life hung by a thread, he has since died. In each of these killings, the youth posed […]
A security officer removes a student who disrupted the Israeli ambassador’s speech at the Irvine campus of the University of California (Photo: UprisingRadio.org) Legal help for Palestine solidarity activists facing harassment and repression in the U.S. is on the way. Two leading civil liberties groups in the U.S. have launched what they’re calling the Palestine […]
Obama in Tehran A friend sent this picture along from Tehran. Obama wears a shiny grey suit straight out of an 80s movie, and is pictured with Shemr Yazid, a legendary villain in Shia lore, the general of a usurping caliph in the 7th century. The message on the billboard is: “Be with us, (ba […]