The Green Line established in 1949 in Israel and Palestine and affirmed in UN Resolution 242 in 1967 was never intended as a permanent border, writes scholar Gerald David Fincham. And it should not be, because a 78% to 22% division of territory between Jews and Arabs is unfair.
On April 29-30 Friends of Sabeel North America organized a highly successful conference in Santa Cruz CA, titled “Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions at the Crossroads of Campus, Church & Community.” Local rabbis and other leaders in the Jewish community, including the director of Santa Cruz Hillel, tried hard to shut it down, focusing on the Peace United Church of Christ that hosted the conference. The juggernaut of pressure, exerted not only on the conference organizers and local Christian clergy, but directly on the lay leaders of the UCC church to prevail on their pastor to block the conference as flagrantly anti-Semitic, included letters and opinion pieces in the local newspaper, The Sentinel. The conference went on, filling the large church with close to 400 attendees.
Israel has officially refused to renew the travel document of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement co-founder Omar Barghouti in a move that amounts to a travel ban and is an escalation of its attacks on Palestinian human rights defenders who nonviolently advocate for Palestinian rights under international law.
Roger Waters tells the Independent that the Israel lobby has tried to smear him as a Nazi and an anti-semite for ten years because of his support for Palestinians, and that these tactics have stopped American artists from speaking out lest their careers ‘will be destroyed.’
Read an an excerpt from the new book ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’ by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami. The book tells the story of how Syrians took to the streets in 2011 to demand the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the political and humanitarian nightmare still unfolding today. This excerpt explores how the regime responded with overwhelming violence to the initial non-violent protests, and the choices facing grassroots activists as the revolution militarized.
Palestinian astrophysicist Imad Barghouthi, a professor at Al-Quds University, is currently being held in Israeli administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial. His three-month sentence is indefinitely renewable on the basis of “secret evidence” to which he and his lawyer are denied access. “Imad is the source of love and kindness in our house. He is very joyful and he spreads positivity wherever he goes,” says Duha Barghouthi, 17, Imad’s daughter and a graduating high school student. “My father is a man who loves his country and he has paid a price for that.”
Israel has officially refused to renew the travel document of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement co-founder Omar Barghouti in a move that amounts to a travel ban and is an escalation of its attacks on Palestinian human rights defenders who nonviolently advocate for Palestinian rights under international law. Barghouti says, “I am unnerved but certainly undeterred by these threats. Nothing will stop me from struggling for my people’s freedom, justice and peace”.
The scandal over anti-Zionism in the Labour Party in Britain is an effort by atavistic Zionists to cast Zionism as Judaism and therefore all critiques of Zionism as anti-Jewish. We must fight this ideological sleight-of-hand.
Recognising Zionism’s ideological roots, inspired by racial theories of peoplehood that in part fueled the Second World War, might allow us to understand modern Israel a little better. And why it seems incapable of extending a hand of peace to the Palestinians.
Human rights advocates were present both inside and outside of RE/MAX’s annual shareholder meeting in Denver, Colorado last Thursday. Driving into the entrance of the Marriott Tech Center Hotel, RE/MAX board members and shareholders were greeted by around 30 protesters from CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace, Friends of Sabeel – North America, and Coloradans for Justice in Palestine. The group held signs, banners, and cardboard boxes painted like Israeli settlements to express their demand that RE/MAX immediately stop profiting from Israeli apartheid by selling, renting, and advertising homes in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.