‘Avi does the Holy Land’ is a video blog with a provocative series of videos about Avi, a fictionalized Canadian Jewish woman who travels to Israel on a birthright trip and falls in love with the place, or so she says. Is it satire? Hasbara? You be the judge.
Israeli intelligence handed over the body of Musab Mahmoud al-Ghazali to the Palestinians on Sunday night, 65 days after he was killed by Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem, for him to be buried. Al-Ghazali, a 26-year-old Palestinian from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, was shot dead on Dec. 26 after Israeli police say he pulled a knife on an officer in Allenby Square in Jerusalem. However, a witness on the scene said that al-Ghazali had not been holding a knife when he was killed.
Hatim Kanaaneh offers a humorous comment on a situation in Lubbock, Texas where a banner declaring “Love to all” in Arabic was reported to Homeland Security and the FBI.
“If the day comes and I have the opportunity to lead the country, not to mention become the prime minister, I will build the temple on the Temple Mount,” rookie Likud lawmaker and Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Oren Hazan announced last Thursday night at a panel in Petach Tikvah, an Israeli city 20 kilometers east of Tel Aviv. After the panel discussion organized by the group Students For The Temple Mount, Dan Cohen and David Sheen asked Hazan how he would demolish Al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock in order to make way for a temple, he replied, “It would not be responsible at this point in time to tell you how we would do it, but I will say it clear and loud: When I have the opportunity to do it, I will.”
Neoconservatives are having panic attacks over Donald Trump’s noninterventionist foreign policy ideas. Robert Kagan, who helped bring us the Iraq war, is endorsing Hillary Clinton. While Jennifer Rubin says Trump endorser Chris Christie finked out after “months and months” of careful coaching on foreign policy by outside experts.
Milbank Tweed law firm sponsored events at Columbia Law school featuring Israeli leaders, and a session criticizing “CIA torture,” but it only raised an objection to its funding when Harvard students had a Palestinian solidarity event.
Escaped Palestinian prisoner Omar al-Nayif was found dead inside the headquarters of the Palestinian embassy in Bulgaria [Sofia] Friday, in what senior Palestinian officials and his family have said was an “assassination” carried out by Israel. Nayif, a 52-year-old man from Jenin, had been living in Bulgaria for years, but late last year sought refuge in the Palestinian embassy after Israel demanded his extradition so he could see out a life sentence over the killing of an Israeli in Jerusalem’s Old City in 1986
Israeli forces on Friday suppressed a peaceful march of Palestinian protesters in the occupied West Bank district of Hebron, firing tear gas, physically assaulting and throwing stun grenades directly at protesters and journalists. The march was in commemoration of the Ibrahimi mosque massacre of 1994
It’s time to put the word “occupation” to rest and move on to recognize a reality that many of us are not yet comfortable with – a Jewish controlled Greater Israel that will take decades to reform into some version of a pluralistic society, just as the Christian-controlled countries of Europe and the Americas dragged themselves out of barbarism (slavery, burning witches, the Crusades, etc) and emerged into a more liberal future
In discussing the Israeli policy of withholding the bodies of Palestinians shot while allegedly undertaking terrorist actions, several Israeli leaders have stated recently that Palestinians sanctify death and therefore do not grieve their dead as Israeli do. But they are projecting their own reverence for violence on to the victims.