Muslims across the world have spent June observing the religious month of Ramadan. In Gaza, where reconstruction after three wars in six years has stalled, the celebrations, fasts followed by feasts, and prayer has brought a welcomed sense of normalcy. Palestinian photographer Mohammed Asad brings a glimpse of how Gazans enjoy the month of Ramadan.
Days away from the Eid holiday Shafooq Baloot, 25, does not know how or when she will do her annual clothes shopping. “We can’t go everywhere whenever we would like,” the English teacher tells Allison Deger. The Israeli army shut the main entrance to Baloot’s town with cement blocks and an earth mound after a teen from her village killed a 13-year old Israeli in a nearby settlement last Thursday. Over the weekend Israeli forces barricaded at least 20 more villages in the Hebron area, along with the southern entrance to the city of Hebron itself.
Haaretz and Foreign Policy run pieces saying that Elie Wiesel was an ethnocentric religious nationalist who turned his back on Palestinians. But those are the exceptions. The New York Times says his only detractors were literary, and WNYC says Wiesel cared about Palestinian “suffering,” but urged Palestinians not to give way to the victimization narrative.
Israel’s political crisis in which Netanyahu is confronted by generals was brought about by Palestinian violent resistance, resulting in a horrifying murder in March that catalyzed Israeli leaders. From John Brown to Nelson Mandela to Zionists themselves, those who seek to revolutionize an unjust order have used terrorism.
West Jerusalem’s apartheid: Look no further than Gap, North Face, American Eagle, Clarks, Timberland, the fancy shops in the Mamilla mall that erases the difference between the Old City and the city west of the green line.
Marc Ellis reflects on the flawed witness of Elie Wiesel. Ellis says Wiesel was deeply corrupted by his use of the Holocaust he suffered so deeply from, but he was hardly alone: “Elie Wiesel was hardly alone in becoming so stuck in Holocaust suffering that he failed to realize or care about what Jewish power was and is doing to the Palestinian people. We, the Jewish people, averted our eyes. We, the Jewish people, became corrupted through our use of unjust power against others.”
Zack Beauchamp of Vox grandly explains that many British statements critical of Israel cross the line into anti-Semitism. It never crosses liberal Zionists’ minds that the indifference to Palestinian human rights is evidence of racism.
The leader of the Israeli political party the Joint List, Ayman Odeh, referred a demand Thursday to the Government Judicial Advisor to open an investigation against the Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman due to suspicion of incitement to violence, when he referred to Member of Knesset Hanin Zoabi as a terrorist.
For the second time in two days, a Palestinian from the occupied village of Bani Naim was killed by Israeli soldiers after an alleged attack. Sara Daoud ata-Tarayra, 27, was pregnant and going to the mosque in Hebron; witnesses disputed the police account that she attacked anyone, saying she ran when pepper-gassed.
The report is that Bernie Sanders just won a string of concessions from the Hillary Clinton camp on the 2016 party platform. Wall Street reform, banking reform, regulations on hedge funds, criminal justice reform, greater opposition to the death penalty, and let’s fight for a $15 minimum wage. Sanders is “winning some big victories,” says Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, but guess what’s not in the concessions? Where are Clinton’s redlines? You guessed it. Vox says the sticking points are Trans Pacific Partnership, stronger measures to slow global warming, and Israel Palestine.