On October 15, representatives of the Iqrit Community Association Shadia Sbait and Ameer Toume spoke to Congressional representatives in room 221 of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Sbait and Toume, both Palestinian citizens of Israel, have been making the case for Palestinian right of return on a month-long tour of the United States. The fact that members of the audience included Congressional staffers suggests an interest by some members of Congress on changing the discourse on Palestine.

Israeli Jews live happily with the occupation because they believe they are the chosen people, the world’s eternal victims, and Palestinians are not fully human, Gideon Levy says in Greenburgh, NY, and only international pressure will change the Israeli calculus to bring about one state with equal rights

Should US emulate Israeli policy of privileging one ethnicity over another? Should we use nukes because Christian Zionists imagine the rapture in Jerusalem? And other questions for those who would be president

Jamil Dakwar of the ACLU says the violence in Israel and Palestine demands international opposition to the occupation, but Obama has spent all his political capital on Iran and Cuba, so he won’t say what is obvious

Over the last decade, the movement for Palestinian freedom and equality has increasingly become the focus of social justice movements, especially on college campuses. Like prior movements fighting a status quo of structural violence, this movement faces heavy-handed repression designed to silence marginalized voices and stifle progressive ideas that might chart the path to a better tomorrow. Two recently released reports, one by Jewish Voice for Peace and the other by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, document this widespread and systematic suppression.

Mohammed Alhammami shares the conversation he would like to have with an Israeli soldier who does not understand why Palestinians would be upset. The answer can be explained in one word: “occupation.”

France will present a Security Council resolution this week on behalf of the Palestinian leadership calling for international observers deployed in Jerusalem, according to senior Palestinian official and member of the PLO executive committee Hanan Ashrawi.

Rogel Alpher and Uri Avnery are two Israeli voices seeking dramatic transformation of their society. Why don’t we hear them in the U.S. mainstream?

Michael Marder writes: According to classical political theory, human beings enter into a social contract and renounce their right to exercising unlimited violence in order not to fall prey to the violence of others. In Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the Leviathan, they invest the sovereign with that right, so as to be better protected from arbitrary force in a hostile “dog eat dog” world. What is going on today in Israel/Palestine is the unraveling of the original social contract, given that the Israeli Leviathan can no longer fulfill its task of maintaining internal stability through the denial of human rights and unlimited violence channeled outwards in the direction of Palestinian people.

An Eritrean national shot by an Israeli security guard after he was surrounded by a frenzied mob of Israelis in a Beersheva bus station in southern Israel Sunday night, died today of wounds sustained during the assault. A video circulated on social media shows the man, Haftom Zarhum, 29, laying on the floor in a pool of blood, as security officials attempt to stave off the crowd. One Israeli threw a bench at him.