Netanyahu wants to deflect attention from a French peace plan by pushing a “regional peace summit” based on the Arab Peace Plan of 2002, which promised Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for ending the occupation. Israel’s sudden interest in the plan is odd, given that it has not been discussed in cabinet since the Saudis unveiled it 14 years ago. In truth, Netanyahu backs the idea because he knows reaching a region-wide agreement would be impossible with the Middle East in turmoil.

Sunday June 5th marks the 49th anniversary of the day known to Palestinians as the ‘Naksa’ [‘setback’], the day that the Israeli military occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula. During the Naksa, around 300,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, and became refugees. 49 years later, the military occupation continues.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens says that Donald Trump is like Mussolini, in his “ethnic… populism,” but when it comes to Israeli generals’ charges that Netanyahu is fascistic, the ethnocentric hypocritical Stephens says the generals are rejecting the “religious ideological” currents that are the “stuff of democracy.”

“Heartbroken and furious, I would never return there again,” Ayelet Waldman said of Israel after visiting separate-and-unequal Hebron with Breaking the Silence in 2014. She and her husband Michael Chabon are working on a collection about the occupation that has gotten a lot of attention in the Israeli press and is sure to shock American Jews.

Israeli soldiers invaded, Friday, Kufur Qaddoum town, in the northern West Bank district of Qalqilia, and assaulted the weekly protesters, wounding two siblings with live rounds. The army also sprayed many homes with wastewater mixed with chemicals.

Jonathan Ofir writes: I focus on extremist elements in Israel because the country needs radical change. This is not the kind of change that is bound to come from Israeli ‘democracy’, because that ‘democracy’ has been conditioned by ethnic cleansing and Apartheid to serve the needs of its ruling majority, with a minor ‘permission’ for representation of the ‘others’ on strict condition that they do not challenge the Jewish State. That is not democracy.

Palestinian parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar returned to her West Bank home in Ramallah today after more than a year in an Israeli prison on charges related to her political activism. Jarrar was arrested in April 2014 first under an administrative detention order, a form of imprisonment without charge. In December of that year she signed a plea deal for a 14-month sentence after a lengthy hearing. After a tearful reunion with her husband, mother, and supporters at the checkpoint, Jarrar then traveled to her house in Ramallah. Once in her backyard amid shrubs and fruit trees Jarrar described her legal ordeal, and the long journeys she made to Israel’s military court to stand trial.

On the occasion of Bernard Lewis’s 100th birthday David Shasha says we must never overlook his prominent role in hasbara circles and Eurocentric racism. Lewis, who was the first to articulate the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis that has become ubiquitous in right-wing discussions of the West and Middle East, has dutifully served Western political interests for many decades and brazenly used his scholarship to promote those interests under the guise of academic objectivity.

What the heck is Zehava Galon of leftwing Meretz doing snuggling up to the rightwing cultural minister Miri Regev at a Tel Aviv Pride event? Because they’re both Zionist Jews, and committed to an ethnic-supremacist project.

Sebastian Junger says that in Israel, “no one says, thank you for service, because it’s like saying thank you for paying your taxes. I mean everybody does it.” But one fifth of the population does not do it, for ethnic-religious reasons that Americans would find objectionable.