Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are cashed strapped this winter because Israel is withholding $240 million in tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority as punishment for joining the ICC. This is radical, though it’s not unusual and something we’ve come to expect. But turning off the electricity in the middle of winter as blizzards sweep across the Middle East is nothing short of sadistic. The Los Angeles Times reports Israel cut the power to more than 700,000 Palestinians in two of Palestine’s largest urban areas, Nablus and Jenin, for more than 45 minutes “and warned that more outages are coming if Palestinian officials don’t pay millions of dollars in outstanding debt.”

Israel has not granted a single Sudanese asylum seeker refugee status, in spite of a wave of migrants fleeing violence, according to official state statistics, submitted to the High Court of Justice on February 16. In all, the government has granted refugee status to only 0.07% of the 5,573 Sudanese and Eritreans who have applied for asylum in the country—a mere four individuals.

A little over one month before a deadline to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, three weeks before Israelis head to the polls, and 8 days before Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu is set to address both houses of Congress, Aljazeera’s investigative unit has begun publishing a cache of leaked intelligence files exposing the Mossad, MI6, and the CIA. Dubbed “The Spy Cables”, the initial reporting leads to one conclusion: Benjamin Netanyahu is a liar. The timing couldn’t be better.

As Israel’s relations in the US and Europe falter, Benjamin Netanyahu has begun looking elsewhere for economic – and ultimately political – patrons. Netanyahu announced last month that he was courting trade with China, India and Japan and last year Israel did more trade with these Asian countries than with the US — much of it focused on the burgeoning arms market. Israel hopes to convert Chinese and Indian dependency on Israeli armaments into diplomatic cover. One day Israel may be relying on a Chinese veto at the UN, not a US one.

Mainstream Israeli political parties are united in rejecting the international consensus for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they are divided over “the Kerry Plan” which would see Israel annex its major illegal settlement blocs on critical chunks of Palestinian territory, redraw its border roughly along the route of the illegal Wall and nullify the refugees’ right of return. Whereas Netanyahu is content to maintain the status quo of occupation and settlement expansion, the pro-Kerry camp seeks its legal consecration through a US-brokered deal. If Netanyahu forms Israel’s next government, Palestine’s foreseeable future will resemble its unbearable present. But if Netanyahu loses, the decisive obstacle to securing formal Palestinian capitulation to US-Israeli terms may be removed with him.

On Monday, February 23 a coalition of civil society and human rights organizations delivered the names of thousands of constituents who sent letters and signed petitions to their members of Congress calling on them to #SkipTheSpeech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3.

The past week has seen international efforts to prevent an Israeli-Jordanian gas deal grow. Jordan BDS has called upon the international boycott movement to stand against the deal, and on Friday, February 20th activists in Denver, London and South Africa took to the streets to join the call to action. If the gas deal goes through it will increase Israeli dominance in the region by controlling the energy supply to bordering countries, and undermine the growing BDS movement.

Support for recognition of Palestine is a symbolic yet meaningful action to show support for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and freedom from occupation. It is an action that Palestinian leaders have been asking for since 1988.

Last week Sara Moon, Bella Crowe and Ruth Kappe left Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, and joined the Jewish National Fund cycle trail from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in order to uncover the hidden stories related on its path. Along the way they engage Israelis on their understanding of the Nakba and what it continues to mean today. Their organization, Cycle ’48, is an ongoing project remapping erased histories on two wheels.

Posters calling Palestine solidarity activists anti-Semitic were posted on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus yesterday at multiple locations. The image on the posters is striking. It is a copy of a widely circulated image of Hamas members holding a person they suspected of collaborating with the Israeli army during the last assault on the Gaza Strip. The words “Students for Justice in Palestine” are at the top of the image, while the word “#Jewhaters” is at the bottom of the posters. “These posters are a clear example of hate speech directed against Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as supporters of Palestinian freedom and equality,” the UCLA SJP chapter said in a statement. “They rely on Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes to paint Palestinians as terrorists and to misrepresent Students for Justice in Palestine as anti-Semitic.”