Rabbis from Rashi to Ramban have long tried to hide or apologize for bible teaching that a soldier must “satisfy his lust” with a captive women. Now the Israeli chief army rabbi Eyal Qarim’s comments have exposed the hideous point for all to see.

After 10 days in his beloved Israel, Eric Alterman diminishes the crisis: he leaves out ‘fascism’ charges made by leading politicians and only notices Palestinian attacks on Israelis, not the other way round.

Richard Falk examines the argument for a U.S. disengagement from the Middle East: “Unfortunately, for America and the peoples throughout the Middle East the US seems incapable of extricating itself from yet another geopolitical quagmire that is partly responsible for generating extra-regional terrorism of the sort that has afflicted Europe in the last two years. And so although disengagement is a sensible course of action, it won’t happen for a long, long time, if at all. Unlike BREXIT, for AMEXIT, and geopolitics generally, there are no referenda offered the citizenry.”

Changing public policy for freedom and justice in Palestine requires more people seeing what the mainstream media blacks out. If you agree that change is urgently needed—and that truth-telling journalism is a necessary tool to get to that change—please help increase Mondoweiss’s impact.

The New York Times demonstrates the iron law of institutions in its support for Clinton. Its opinion columns have been almost uniformly nasty toward Bernie Sanders. Ultimately his policy based critiques of Clinton terrifies the editors and they don’t want him or the movement he represents to have any credibility even if he endorses Clinton, because he hasn’t retracted his critique.

In a Facebook video, NY Times editors James Bennet and Jodi Rudoren speak of all the “American” pressures on reporting from Jerusalem without ever saying the word “Jewish.” That would be too honest. And these are people who will tell Americans about the Israel lobby?

Each year since 2002, activists have marked the Nakba in major Israeli cities on Independence Day. The organization De-Colonizer produced a video showing this year’s action where activists asked partygoers celebrating Israeli independence if they would wear a sticker that said “Can you bear the NAKBA on Independence Day?”

As the extensive Israeli military invasion into the southern West Bank district of Hebron continues to escalate, the soldiers destroyed, on Thursday morning, water wells, and the entrances of several Palestinian homes.

Cornel West likened Palestine to Vietnam as the issue of our time for young Americans, but the Democratic Party platform committee turned a deaf ear, in refusing to put the words occupation and settlements in the platform.

At about 3:00 am on October 11, 2015, Israeli police and border guards kicked open the door of the Tatour family home and hauled Dareen Tatour off in her pajamas. The police had no warrant and offered no explanation for the shocking pre-dawn raid. It was only after twenty days of imprisonment and four interrogations that Tatour and her family finally learned the exact nature of the charges. She was being held for “incitement” because of two Facebook posts and a poetry video clip that she posted on YouTube. Nine months later, an Israeli court issued Tatour a 48-hour pass to visit her family in Reineh, a small Palestinian town outside of Nazareth, where Kim Jensen talked to Tatour about her case, her work, and her aspirations as an artist.