Palestinian writer and activist Nada Elia responds to claims that an economic boycott of Israel is bound to fail: “BDS will never bankrupt Israel, and that is not necessary for it to achieve its goals: showing that the emperor has no clothes, and empowering justice-minded people everywhere to disengage from a hyper-militarized, violent rogue state, until it stops violating international law and the human rights of an oppressed people.”
In what was intended as a message to Palestinian citizens of Israel on “equality and dignity for all,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s accidentally called Arabs “goats,” and received backlash from Palestinian political parties for staging a “hypocritical charade.”
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Launching his new collaborative work in East Jerusalem, esteemed Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, hopes to shift the paradigm through which we see the Israel/Palestine conflict: one of “settler-colonialism and its connection with apartheid.” In essence, the conflict is not between two competing national movements with an equal claim to the land, but between a movement of settler-colonialists and a native people.
Wilson Dizard wraps up his time in Cleveland and says the 2016 Republican National Convention was a watershed moment for American politics. He says the city’s Public Square felt a bit like Tahrir Square in 2013 during the counter-revolution and shares a conversation between a white nationalist Trump supporter who chatted with the children of immigrants, one of whom asked whether he would want to be saved by them in a hurricane. “Perhaps,” he said. But we’re in that hurricane, and people need to show compassion.
Democrats can’t oppose occupation and settlements in the Democratic platform “because Sheldon Adelson will come out against us,” Clintonites told Sanders rep James Zogby, Zogby related in Philadelphia today. He also said that Democrats support the use of boycott against Israel to end settlements overwhelmingly, by 47-14.
The Democratic Party begins its national presidential convention in Philadelphia on Monday, under circumstances that political scientists refer to with the technical term “shitshow.” Wilson Dizard reports from the scene.
Want to know what it means for any human being to live under occupation? In The Way to the Spring, Ben Ehrenreich gives an education that will sicken you, of “the almost infinitely complex system of control that Israel exercised over Palestinians throughout the West Bank,” and of the terrible losses it imposes on those who struggle to resist it.
Israeli settlers verbally attacked Palestinian residents of the town of al-Khader in the southern occupied West Bank on Saturday, threatening them with a gun while the Palestinians were working on their land, which is situated in the Bethlehem district between the illegal Israeli settlements of Neve Daniel and El-Azar.
Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his mother’s suicide and Israel’s birth, is now a film by Natalie Portman that asks the question, Can you “be sensitive” and also be a Zionist?