It was presumably intended as an Israeli history lesson to the world. A video posted to social media by Israel’s foreign ministry shows an everyday Jewish couple, Jacob and Rachel, in a home named the “Land of Israel”. A series of knocks on the door brings 3,000 years of interruptions to their happiness. First it’s the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, Hellenists, Arabs, Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottomans – all straight out of Monty Python central casting. The chauvinism in portraying Jacob and Rachel as the only normal folk, stoically enduring barbarians butchering each other in their living room, is ugly enough. But it is harder still to take seriously an account in which the Palestinians suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1948, as Britain departs.

A new open letter calls on the Palestine solidarity movement to “unite for Palestine” and put an end to divisive attacks on one another.

Israeli forces detained 17 Palestinians in raids across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem overnight and during the day Monday, including 10 teenagers at Dar al-Aytam school in Jerusalem’s Old City that Israeli police accused of throwing rocks. Locals told Ma‘an they were detained as they left school and were chased by Israeli forces through the alleys of the Old City. Samir Jibril, the director of the Palestinian Ministry of Education department, had told Ma‘an that the Israeli soldiers’ accusations of rock throwing were “bogus” due to the fact that there were “security bars” secured over all the school’s windows, making it nearly impossible for students to throw anything out of them.

Hagai El-Ad, the head of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, urged the United Nations Security Council to take action at last against the occupation because, “The reality will not change if the world does not intervene. I suspect that our arrogant government also knows this, so it’s busy fearmongering against such an intervention.” Netanyahu has responded in outrage.

Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign team has aggressively sought to win votes from Americans living overseas in Israel, but the latest polls taken of the Jewish population show Trump trailing far behind Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The gap is so wide, the figures are almost as bad for Trump as those in Clinton’s home state of New York where she benefits from a 25 point lead.

A political candidate with a messianic complex, who has incited his supporters to violence, exhibited authoritarian tendencies, openly espoused racism, cheated on his wife repeatedly, and manipulated his associates for personal enrichment. The similarities between Rabbi Meir Kahane and Donald Trump are striking.

“A Potemkin process is better than nothing,” Hillary Clinton wrote in a hacked email about Benjamin Netanyahu’s prevarications on a Palestinian state in 2015, an indication that the U.S. will forever give cover to the Israeli government to manage the conflict.

Palestinians are beasts and snakes and Israelis need to cut off their heads — some of the racist rhetoric from Israeli leaders featured in ads in American university newspapers sponsored by the Palestine Advocacy Project.

Amani Sawari responds to Mohammed Alhammami’s essay ‘A letter from Gaza to black America’: Until recently I’d felt as though the African American community was alone in the fight against these types of injustices. After reading your letter I’m hopeful that the connection between Black people in America and people of color around the world, which has always been present, will only continue to strengthen.

“There are now more than two million residents in the Gaza Strip after baby Waleed Shaath was born last night in Rafah in southern Gaza,” interior ministry spokesman Iyad Bezm told AFP on Wednesday. Gaza, a tiny enclave squeezed between Egypt, Israel and the Mediterranean Sea and just 12 kilometres across at its widest point, has one of the highest population densities in the world, according to the United Nations. The territory could be “unliveable” by 2020, the UN said last year, due in large part to “high population density and overcrowding.”