Storytelling and poetical language may be the best way to change US attitudes on Palestine, as a panel of contributors to the collection Extreme Rendition featuring Zia Jaffrey, Sinan Antoon and Teju Cole at New School last week got a welcome reception from packed crowd
Knesset members from all coalition parties and some in the opposition signed a bill that would deport Palestinian attackers’ family members to Gaza, even though the Israeli Attorney General said last week that expelling the families from the West Bank to Gaza violates Israeli and international law.
British security company G4S, the world’s largest, has responded to a four-year long global BDS campaign protesting its role in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights by announcing yesterday it will sell its Israeli subsidiary in the coming “12 to 24 months.” In describing the move, The Financial Times reported that G4S was “extracting itself from reputationally damaging work.”
On March 8 the Pew Research Center published a major new survey on Israel and Israeli attitudes that revealed deep-seated racism in Israeli society. Here is one picture that summarizes the findings.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today for failing to condemn the killing of an American tourist in Jaffa yesterday evening in an attack where 10 more were injured.
One of the great storylines from last night’s surprise victory for Bernie Sanders in Michigan is that he won the Arab-American vote — and the mainstream media revealed its Islamophobia when several commentators were stunned that Arab Americans would vote for a Jew.
Eight months after the firebombing that killed five-year-old Ahmad Dawabshe’s baby brother and parents in the occupied West Bank village of Duma, he is still undergoing treatment in the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan. In a heartbreaking video Dan Cohen talks with Ahmad’s grandfather, Hussein Dawabshe, who has devoted his life to taking care of Ahmad, “I am willing to stay and keep taking care of Ahmad for one, two, three or ten years. What matters is that Ahmad is not in danger. I want him to live without trouble and fear.”
Today, International Women’s Day, the Austrian Parliament was scheduled to hold an event called In Grandmothers’ Words. This event would have joined eight female WWII witnesses from around the world in Vienna in an unprecedented opportunity for the public to hear their experiences regarding specific topics, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Uprising in Warsaw, and the Blitz in London. However, fueled by a biased article about Hedy Epstein, who was scheduled to appear, the event was cancelled. A protest emerged in an open letter originating from the Austrian public and with strong international support: over 180 signatures from 19 countries, including almost 50 Austrians and eminent figures.
Palestinian leaders inside Israel and other members of the Palestinian community respond to a new Pew poll that found almost half of Israeli Jews think “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Diana Buttu says, “It is acceptable to be racist in Israel: the Prime Minister has made latent racism mainstream.”
In the West Bank, leading feminist and imprisoned Marxist-Leninist politician Khalida Jarrar released a statement from jail to mark International Women’s Day. Jarrar writes, “This year, our call focuses on the freedom and self-determination of our people, and the freedom and self-determination of Palestinian women: achieving equality and liberation, and ending all forms of oppression and injustice committed against them.”