Israel’s large Palestinian minority held its first-ever conference on BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – this past weekend in spite of anti-boycott legislation introduced five years ago that exposes activists in Israel to harsh financial penalties. One participant called it a sign that the Palestinian minority was slowly emerging from the law’s “reign of terror”.
One anti-establishment candidate is soaring, Donald Trump. While the other is sputtering, Bernie Sanders. That’s because Trump has taken on the foreign policy elite in his party, the neoconservatives, while Sanders has laid off the liberal interventionists who have never seen a regime change they didn’t like.
The United States government continues to remain astonishingly quiet about the rising dictatorship in the Indian Ocean island nation of Maldives, where the charismatic, democratic Muslim leader Mohamed Nasheed has been deposed, cheated out of an electoral comeback, jailed for 13 years and finally forced into exile. Perhaps it is because last September, the Maldives regime hired the Podesta Group, an influential public relations firm that is close to the Democratic Party, to promote its image.
William H. Schaap, radical lawyer and co-founder/publisher of CovertAction Quarterly and Sheridan Square Press, died on February 25, 2016, of pulmonary disease at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 75.
Isaac Herzog, leader of the Israeli “opposition,” outlines for the readers of the New York Times his recently announced separation plan, aimed at keeping the colonial project intact while affording the world the illusion of something en route to a state for the Palestinians. In the op-ed, “Only Separation Can Lead to a Two-State Solution,” Herzog is explicit that the plan eschews the establishment of a State of Palestinian at this time; instead it allows Israel to take what it wants while maintaining complete control. Neat trick.
Thousands of Palestinian teachers demonstrated yesterday afternoon in cities across the West Bank, marking the start of a third week of strikes. What began as a protest over a bureaucratic 2.5% pay increase in early February has quickly become a wider anti-democratic crackdown against Palestinian society’s beloved and underpaid public servants, teachers.
Jeffrey Goldberg described Jewish voters in last week’s Iranian elections as “petting zoo animals.” His condescending and arguably racist characterization of Iran’s Jewish community underlines his desperation to undermine the recent American-Iranian rapprochement – even when that normalization has been eagerly welcomed by Iran’s Jews.
The Freedom2Boycott in Virginia Coalition welcomes Monday’s unanimous decision of the Senate General Laws and Technology Committee to delay consideration of HB1282 until the 2017 legislative session, if at all. The bill would have wasted taxpayers money by requiring the Secretary of Commerce and Trade to spend valuable time and resources compiling information on boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns for Palestinian freedom and rights, and could have led to the development of an “enemies list” of potential government contractors to be blacklisted.
In what began as a case of wrong directions, one Palestinian was killed overnight in Qalandia refugee camp in the West Bank in clashes that broke out between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli forces during an Israeli army rescue mission to retrieve two soldiers who lost their way after marking their course with the mobile directions app Waze.
Peter F. Cohen offers an impassioned answer to the question of why he is going to Washington DC for the National March to Support Palestine and Protest AIPAC on March 20.