A man who had a heart attack at the wheel and crashed into a Tel Aviv restaurant and then was beaten to death while unconscious was thought by his assailants to be “not a good person.” I.e., a Palestinian terrorist. This is not the first mistaken lynching in Israel, and it disturbs the Israeli narrative, we’re the victims.
A frontpage article in the New York Times says that 30-60,000 Palestinians a year go illegally across the “security barrier” to work in Israel, along with 55,000 legal workers; thus making clear that the wall hasn’t stopped attacks on Israelis, Palestinians have chosen not to use violence by and large.
On June 19 an article appeared in the Times of Israel criticizing Dan Cohen and David Sheen’s recent video ‘Worship God By Nakba’: Jerusalem march celebrates Israeli occupation with messianic fervor. The article claims that the moment in the film that the title is taken from, when a marcher yells “Worship God By Nakba” was mistranslated to include the word “Nakba.” In the article below, Cohen and Sheen respond to the criticism and the ensuing controversy, including why they have decided to remove the word “Nakba” from the video.
Twenty members of Congress signed a letter to President Barack Obama on Monday, urging the appointment of a Special Envoy for Palestinian Children to ensure the U.S. government prioritizes Palestinian children’s rights.
PEN American Center released a statement last Friday expressing concern over Israel’s arrest of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who was arrested in October 2015 over a poem and two Facebook posts. The PEN American Center statement is welcome because it uses the organization’s credibility to draw attention to the injustice of Tatour’s detention, yet it denies Tatour’s very self-identification as a Palestinian, denies the existence of Israeli military occupation, and fails to call for Tatour’s release.
Netanyahu is alone. He has lost every world leader and his own security establishment and is reduced to the support of Jeffrey Goldberg, the lobby and neocon hacks in the US. The Israeli establishment will be able to remove Netanyahu politically in the next year or so and it will try and get a peace deal with the Palestinians. And you’d never know any of this from reading the New York Times.
In the aftermath of successive Israeli onslaught waged on the Gaza Strip, the number of Palestinians with physical disabilities drastically increased. Gaza journalist Isra El-Namy covers American coach Jess Markt’s visit to Khan Younis as he trains disabled Palestinians to play basketball and train for future tournaments.
Jordana Cutler, who is currently the Chief of Staff at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, and a longtime advisor to Netanyahu, has been named as head of policy and communications at Facebook’s Israel office. The appointment comes as the Israeli government has put pressure on the social network to monitor “incitement” and material critical of the country. Cutler’s position as a diplomatic government official suggests that her role will be to bring Facebook and the Israeli government closer together.
Haaretz reports that the company commander of Elor Azaria, the soldier on trial for shooting and killing a prone Palestinian assailant in Hebron, has become the target of threats since he testified in court last week against Azaria. A settler was arrested for an alleged death threat.
Last month, Palestinians everywhere commemorated Al Nakba, and Nada Elia says that Palestine solidarity circles are right to celebrate the discursive change that has finally shattered the Zionist stranglehold on the mainstream narrative around the question of Palestine. But, she writes, solidarity must be reciprocal, “Diaspora Palestinians living in the US must also seek to redress the consequences of the catastrophe that befell the indigenous people of the land we now inhabit. Many of us do recognize this injustice, and frequently begin our talks and lectures with an acknowledgement that we are speaking on stolen Indigenous land. But we can and should do more.”