When the US bombs Syria it is an act of war that is bound to provoke terrorist acts in the west. Several left and realist writers have been making this obvious point, but the neocon/interventionist political mainstream is resistant to echoing it.
After haunting images of refugee suffering last summer, the U.S. seemed prepared to open its doors to 10,000. Since Paris and San Bernardino, ISIS has what it wants: presidential candidates have turned 180 degrees, calling for a “pause” on refugee resettlement or advocating for a “Christian-refugee-only” policy.
Khalida Jarrar, a leading Palestinian feminist and lawmaker who defied an Israeli order last year to deport her from her West Bank hometown of al-Bireh to the desert city of Jericho, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by an Israeli military court on Monday.
Donald Trump did the impossible; he managed to make Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu look good. Netanyahu took the high ground on Trump’s statements against Muslims; and Trump has now called off his trip to Israel planned for the end of the month.
In October, the graduate student government at UCLA agreed to fund an event on diversity–but on the condition that the gathering had no connection to the movement to divest from companies linked to the Israeli army. The funding stipulation has sparked a legal battle, with civil liberties groups saying that the stipulation is unconstitutional. Activists see the funding condition as one of the most brazen attacks on the rights of pro-Palestinian students to organize. “This is a wake up call to everybody as to what it means to be a [pro] Palestinian activist on campus,” says Yacoub Kureh, the president of UCLA’s SJP chapter.
Baker Awyes,17, from East Jerusalem, is in Israeli prison waiting for his sentence. This is the tenth time Baker was arrested. He has been arrested twice a year on average since he was 13 years old. His mother says, “I am a mother amongst hundreds, we are all worried about our children, and I pray day and night that he is safe, I am scared”.
On November 27, 2015, a meeting was held in downtown Vancouver, Canada under the title “First Nations & Palestinians at the Frontline of Resistance”. On the eve of the meeting, the local Zionist apologist paper the Jewish Independent ran an editorial “Co-opting history”, full of the Israeli Hasbara 3 D’s – Distortions, Diversions and Defamations.
Struggling with his grasp of Middle East issues, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has a plan to make himself plausible: he’s hired a former aide to Israeli PM Netanyahu and announced that he’s visiting that country, second visit inside a year.
Two state solution on the wane. Nearly as many Americans now support “a single democratic state in which both Jews and Arabs are full and equal citizens, covering all of what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories,” reports Shibley Telhami.
Tying together a long history of Jewish social justice activism, Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews Say No! gathered in Rockefeller Plaza on the first night of Chanukah to call for an end to the virulent and growing Islamophobia facing Muslims in the United States.