The New York Times buries the news: young Jews don’t feel attached to Israel and their rabbis want to criticize the country in the wake of Gaza, but keep their mouths shut because of older donors. Rabbi Jill Jacobs speaks courageously on the divide.
New York Times reporter Jodi Rudoren neglects to explain the Golan Heights are occupied territory in a story about Israel shooting down a Syrian fighter jet.
People in the US struggle to see Gaza as anything but a war zone filled with victims, Max Blumenthal says. When they’re actually people a lot like us. Three stories from his recent trip convey the sorrow, pity and despair.
Overnight Tuesday Israeli special forces killed two Palestinian men who were suspected of kidnapping and slaying three Israeli youths abducted in June while hitchhiking in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc of the West Bank. Amer Abu Aisha, 32, and Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, had evaded Israeli forces for over 100 days hiding out in their home city of Hebron no more than five miles from the site of where the remains of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, were discovered over the summer.
Following the firing of Steven Salaita from his position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a group of Jewish faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members from UIUC issued a letter to Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Board of Trustees. Now, the Jewish students, faculty and staff of UIUC who stand in solidarity with Steven Salaita seek support in reemphasizing and strengthening their message to the university administration.
Jewish New Yorkers call upon the Mayor to respond to Islamopobic ads with visible messages of repudiation of such bigotry and a call for respect and safety for all communities.
The Russell Tribunal will be holding a Special Session in Brussels starting tomorrow on examining the crime of genocide in Gaza. Ewa Jasiewicz writes: “Delegitimization of Israeli apartheid and colonialism doesn’t just happen on the streets, in classrooms, at the check-out or in boardrooms. It’s got to happen in the courtroom too. One of the only breaks on Israeli officials’ sense of impunity, unaccountability, and untouchability, is the threat of international law actually being used as it should be, by citizens and lawyers, to mobilise justice for the victims of Israeli violations. Israel calls it ‘lawfare’ and sees it as an attack on its’ freedom to ‘defend’ itself by any and all means necessary; we call it lawfare too, a weapon in resisting the degradation of human lives to the point that they become expendable; inevitable collateral damage under a logic of the powerful emboldened to do whatever, to whoever, whenever they want.
A letter signed by 43 veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit declaring their refusal to continue serving the occupation has sent shockwaves through Israeli society. But not in the way the soldiers may have hoped.
Two weeks after a Yale chaplain lost his job for saying that Gaza has fostered anti-Semitism in Europe, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch refers to “anti-Semitism that flared in Europe in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza war,” and is slapped by Jeffrey Goldberg for doing so. But Israel itself has promoted the confusion of Zionism with Judaism.
The special relationship is suddenly problematic. James Bamford says that the US had no right to give surveillance info to a country that is “hostile” to Palestinian-Americans. And Chris Matthews says neocons pushed the Iraq war to make Arab nations into “friendly neighbors of Israel.”