The burning to death of two Palestinian children over the past year by Israeli settlers is symptomatic of a larger violation of international law, established and maintained by Israel without limits: the Israeli settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is one of the main obstacles towards achieving a lasting and just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
On August 3, 2015, a group of Israeli army vehicles and several Israeli Civil Administration representatives distributed seven demolition orders to the Bedouin community of Jabal al-Baba, which is located between East Jerusalem and the expansive Ma’ale Adumim settlement and at the heart of Israeli authorities’ E1 settlement plan. The plan aims to link settlements around Jerusalem, at once consolidating Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem and separating the north of the West Bank from the south. When asked what the Bedouin community would do if these homes were demolished, community representative Atallah Masara responded without hesitation, “We will rebuild again.”
The various forms of extreme violence that occurred over eighteen hours this weekend– whether directed at Palestinians in the West Bank or African asylum seekers or Israeli Jews in a Pride Parade – are deeply rooted in a greater context of normalized racism
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is reaching out to American Jews to oppose the Iran deal tomorrow. The good thing about the Iran war that the neoconservatives and Netanyahu want is that so many Jews are showing up in favor of the deal. We’re having a vigorous conversation about the influence of the rightwing Israel lobby, and the implicit call for dual loyalty that Zionism depends upon. So Netanyahu’s outreach will cause more American Jews to question whether they really wish to be the buttress of the Jewish state.
The American Israel Education Foundation, the educational wing of AIPAC, is taking all but three freshmen US lawmakers on a tour of Israel in hopes of turning them against the Iran nuclear deal. In total over 50 US congresspeople will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu in August over the course of two separate trips—one for Democrats starting August 3, and another for Republicans starting August 8. See a full list of the congresspeople headed to Israel.
Richard Falk reflects on the news that Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is scheduled to be released from prison on November 20th by comparing his case to Edward Snowden and Mordechai Vanunu.
Ma‘an reports: The parents and brother of the 18-month-old Palestinian killed in an arson attack on Friday remained in critical condition on Sunday, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Health said. There has been a slight improvement in four-year-old Ahmad al-Dawabsha, but Saad al-Dawabsha suffers from third-degree burns covering 80 percent of his body, while his wife Riham suffers third-degree burns across 90 percent of her body.
Liberal Zionists and other two state advocates have to convince us that an Israeli government that has proven ineffective to do anything to stop a pattern of terroristic activities by Jews far away from the settlements can project the physical force necessary to move hundreds of thousands of settlers back into Israel.
The World Union for Progressive Judaism, an international umbrella organization of the Reform, Liberal, Progressive and Reconstructionist movements, has issued a statement condemning the recent attacks on the Dawabshe family in the West Bank village of Duma and on the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade. However, from the statement it seems clear where the organization’s sympathies lie.
This past semester Tom Suarez was the violin and viola teacher at the Gaza branch of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music—”though I never met my students, because Israel blocked me from entering the coastal strip. So I taught by Skype from the West Bank as best I could”