Stephen Cohen and Juan Cole say that Russia and Iran are trying to defeat ISIS with attacks in eastern Syria. A. Trevor Thrall says US attacks on Assad would lead to another endless war. But the media are ignoring leftwing, realist and libertarian voices in favor of the hawks-in-waiting of the Clinton administration.

By using words like ‘occupation’, ‘conflict’ and ‘peace’ we play within the rules and the traps that Israel has created for us, writes Avigail Abarbanel. The real issue is ‘settler colonialism’ (and Jewish exceptionalism tries to explain that away).

Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday night provided an alternative vision for U.S. policy with Israel that questioned whether Washington was doing “Israel any favors” by dumping money into warfare and occupation.

Israel has been itching to run its Separation Wall across the occupied valley of Battir for years, a move that would surely destroy that valley. But Battir has UNESCO status because of its agricultural traditions, including terraced irrigation and heirloom apricot and cucumber, and this has put Israel’s plans on hold for the time being.

Aaron Cantú visits Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights and interviews Wael Tarabieh, who led a cultural center that became a center of local support for the Syrian revolution in 2011, and Kamara Abu Saleh, who works at the anti-occupation human rights group Al-Marsad. They discuss the changing understandings of Druze identity in Israel and the impact of the Syrian civil war on the Golan Heights.

Donald Trump received his first classified briefing from U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, two days after laying out his vision for foreign policy that measures the worth of alliances by whether countries oppose the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Although there are big differences in Trump’s and that of the White House, there are significant similarities, analysts say. For one, both Trump and President Barack Obama are willing to look the other way when it comes to human rights violations committed in campaigns against the ISIS. More than that, both Trump and Hillary Clinton talk about a world where Muslim loyalty to the United States hinges on their condemnation of terrorism.

Middle East Monitor reports: New data released by a United Nations agency and an Israeli NGO has confirmed that Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip actually tightened during July.

Hundreds of fans of Glasgow’s Celtic soccer team defied Scottish law and risked arrest by flying Palestinian flags at a Champions league game against a visiting Israeli team, Hapoel Beersheba. Celtic won the game 5-2. The team faces potential punishment from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).

How can Bret Stephens, who is so sensitive to any slight he perceives against Jews, use the phrase “disease of the Arab mind” when writing about an Egyptian Olympian, and hundreds of millions of other people, in the Wall Street Journal no less? The answer is that a group of ethnocentric spokesmen for the Jewish people, including Jeffrey Goldberg and Benjamin Netanyahu, exercise an Orwellian influence over what can and cannot be said out loud.

The Jewish Daily Forward’s Laura E. Adkins reported Israeli Knesset Member Anat Berko as saying that Students for Justice in Palestine is “collecting information on where Jews live at New York University among others.” What Adkins fails to mention is that Berko’s claim likely originated from a hoax conceived by Adkins herself when she was a student at NYU.