They can not erase, the sharp metallic taste of absence of the hands that terraced these mountains and planted cacti and olives, the heart’s left behind
Falesteen
I will sing your name from the minarets, even after they transformed the mosques into bars, until
the inevitable, Return.
Read two poems by Neta Golan, “Return is Inevitable” and “Love Under Apartheid.”
Activists will march from the Mt Kisco train station to Gov. Cuomo’s house next Wednesday night, July 6, to demand that he rescind his executive order barring state business with organizations that support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Looks like fun!
Three writers on the left, David Bromwich, Eli Clifton and Donald Johnson, fault Hillary Clinton’s essentially-neoconservative approach to foreign policy. She never vigorously opposed the Vietnam War and called that war, like the Iraq war she supported, a “mistake.” Shouldn’t there be more accountability?
Former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren says the Congress would expel a member for doing what Knesset member Hanin Zoabi did yesterday; but the historian has his facts wrong. Congress has only expelled 5 members, none for dissent.
On 17 July 2014, three children from the Shuheibar family were killed by a missile most likely fired by an Israeli drone operator, while another two children were seriously injured. A component of that missile, collected by the family, had “France” written on it. Experts established that it was produced by Eurofarad, a French company later acquired by Exxelia Technologies. French human rights organization ACAT together with a local partner from Gaza, collected evidence and testimonies, and with the help of Ancile-avocats legal office submitted a complaint against the French weapons manufacturer for their complicity in war crimes and involuntary manslaughter.
A Palestinian teen, Muhammad Nasser Tarayra, was killed on Thursday morning in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement in the southern occupied West Bank outside Hebron, after reportedly carrying out an attack against a young settler girl [Hallel Yaffa Ariel,13], who later succumbed to her wounds, as one other Israeli was wounded in the case.
Israel’s parliament sank into bedlam yesterday as the Joint List’s Hanin Zoabi addressed the recent rapprochement between Israel and Turkey over the flotilla raid and demanded an apology for a 2010 session in Knesset where Zoabi was shouted down as a “terrorist” for her comments on the deadly attack. This time, members of government once again jumped out of their seats, with more than a dozen rushing towards Zoabi, yelling “terrorist”– to which she responded, “hit me!” An official in the Zoabi’s faction described the scene as the most volatile inside of the Knesset halls in recent memory.
Israel advocates are using the Clinton campaign to try and stifle BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) in the public square. Norman Brownstein, a board member of AIPAC, says Clinton has promised; while Bakari Sellers circulates an anti-BDS letter signed by 60 other African American Democrats.
What does Hillary Clinton mean by taking the Israel relationship to the “next level”? Maybe what Robert Danin, former State Department official at Harvard, says: a formal treaty between the countries, and do it fast, because young people and Democrats have lost their romance about Israel. (Don’t they have a good reason?)
Israeli Jewish views from right to far right are given, in a NY Times account of the Israeli-Turkish deal ending the impasse over Israel’s killing of 10 men on the Turkish aid boat the “Mavi Marmara” in 2010. The article justifies the Israeli blockade on Gaza and parrots an Israeli version of the attack, leaving out human rights’ groups’ reports that it was brutal and included summary executions.