A historic moment was about to take place at campaign headquarters. An assistant for Ayman Odeh, head of Joint Arab List, a coalition of four parties running on one ticket for the first time, pulled me aside in the Nazareth convention hall and said with a smile, “we got 14 seats.” It was 8pm, there were still two hours to go before precincts would shut. Yet the Nazareth rally was abuzz over early the results. Israeli media had estimated their group would win enough seats in the next Knesset to become the third largest party in the country. It would become an unprecedented feat for the 20-percent Arab-Palestinian minority population. In this election another candidate, Avigdor Liberman, campaigned that they are a fifth column, to be expelled to the West Bank. Those signs, were plastered all over the entrances of Arab villages throughout the north of Israel throughout the past three months.

Harriet Sherwood reports for The Guardian: “Senior UN officials in Jerusalem have been accused of caving in to Israeli pressure to abandon moves to include the state’s armed forces on a UN list of serious violators of children’s rights.”

On March 17, the day of the 2015 Israel election, Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Jewish Israelis that Arabs were voting “in droves.” The New York Times published an article about the incident—and more generally about Netanyahu’s bigoted, jingoistic, far-right tactics to attract more votes—titled “Netanyahu Expresses Alarm That Arab Voter Turnout Could Help Unseat Him.” Several hours later, the NYT published a rewrite of the article—a rewrite not just of parts of it, but of all of it. According the the website NewsDiffs, between 5:13 pm and 9:08 pm 100% of the article was re-written to mostly erase the focus on Netanyahu’s racism.

Steven Salaita says we can understand the entirety of the Israel-Palestine conflict by examining its physical effect on the land.

Phil Weiss reports from Israel the day after elections and Israelis have spoken by reelecting Benjamin Netanyahu following a campaign where he incited against Palestinian citizens of Israel and promised to never allow a Palestinian state. A couple of years ago Peter Beinart said that Zionism was in crisis. But that crisis for American Jews is over now. Zionism is what Netanyahu has shown us it is, in his frank calls on Jews to hold the land and deny the vote to non-Jews. This moment is immensely clarifying because it will force American Zionists to say, What is this Jewish democracy, and what are you prepared to do about it?

Avigail Abarbanel says she is relieved Netanyahu won the Israeli elections: “There wll be no more endless cycles of pointless ‘negotiations’ with Israel pretending that some day it will agree to a two-state solution while continually escalating both settlement (colony) building and the maltreament of the Palestinians. Now everyone will see that the Palestinians were right all along and that Israel has never been a partner for negotiations.”

Earlier this year, a jury in an American court found the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) liable for compensation payments to US citizens who suffered damage in terror actions in Israel between 2000 and 2004. Samer Jaber explains the implications of this unprecedented verdict.

Oberlin College was one of many schools to take part in Israeli Apartheid Week in March. But students at the Ohio liberal arts college put a creative twist on the week. Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine (SFP) created a giant rock installation in their university’s library, in order to raise awareness about the imprisonment of Lina Khattab, a teenage Palestinian college student and dancer in the prominent El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe who was arrested in December 2014 on charges of “throwing stones” and “participating in an unlawful demonstration.”

In Palestine, prisons are a major site in which the struggle for education, among other basic human rights, is tirelessly waged. Roughly 20% of Palestinians have been incarcerated, constituting as much as 40% of the male population. Many are students whose right to an education suffer enormously once imprisoned.

Why is Gaza not an issue in Israel’s elections? A short documentary examines the absence of Gaza and the Palestinians from the Israeli elections.