We are in the process of reloading older comments back into the site that had to be taken down when we were experiences server difficulties earlier this year. We were successfully able to import comments ranging between dates 04-01-2014 to 05-01-2014, which ended up being around 13,000 comments, and we plan on importing another 2 month batch of comments sometime next week.
The 50th anniversary of the occupation is freeing criticism. Greg Slabodkin, a former AIPAC official, comes for conditioning US aid to Israel on that country agreeing to freeze its illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem. He forthrightly says that Israel’s “oppressive and discriminatory settlement policies in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem continue unabated.”
The Black Lives Matter movement’s advocacy for Palestinians has caused a rift to open over Israel between younger and older American Jews, and there’s no sign of it mending any time soon. In its platform, Black Lives Matter characterized Israeli policies towards Palestinians as “genocide” and endorsed Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
More Palestinian homes were demolished in the occupied territories in the first half of 2016 than in all of 2015, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The increased demolitions have been accompanied by a rising number of new settler homes under construction, prompting the U.S. State Department to issue an atypical condemnation of the Jewish state.
Last week the head of the Lower Galilee Regional Council, Moti Dotan, said he didn’t want Arab citizens of Israel using community swimming pools because they have a different “hygiene culture” that is “not like ours.” A Haaretz editorial says Dotan isn’t a racist outlier, but a reflection of the Israeli mainstream: “Dotan’s statement is fed by a leadership that has made the exclusion and isolation of this country’s Arab citizens the backbone of Israeli patriotism.”
In a video released by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, an Israeli soldier is seen confiscating the bicycle of an eight-year old crying Palestinian girl, and then tossing it into nearby bushes.
With cameras surrounding him at a demonstration in occupied Nil’in last Friday, Ayoub Sroor, a Palestinian father who has suffered numerous assaults from soldiers, dared Israeli soldiers to shoot his three-year-old son. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has cruelly distorted the episode to say that Palestinians hate their own children.
The Muslim community is like a lot of other Americans, in the view of the Arab American Institute’s James Zogby: “they simply are very afraid of Donald Trump, and they’re not overly enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton.”
Moara Crivelente, Brazilian journalist and activist, reports on her detainment and deportation at the Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport: “Scattered inscriptions written with toothpaste and food on the bunks and walls of an Israeli facility at the Ministry of Interior Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) declare: ‘for each International Solidarity Movement you deport back home, ten more will come!’ Me and many before me read those words as we waited for our deportation. After hours of interrogation at the Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport, we received a 10-year ban from entering the State of Israel for ‘security reasons.’ With no further explanation, we were declared a threat.”
Prominent “New Atheist” author Sam Harris argues against professor Noam Chomsky that noble intentions of US interventionism morally exonerates any civilian death as ‘collateral damage’. Chomsky maintains that casualties of wars waged by the United States are not by-products of intervention, but are at the very essence of American strategy.