Marc Ellis writes, “Another Yom Kippur has arrived. That special time of reflection and confession is upon us. Yet the reflection and confessional pickings are slim. In the mainstream Jewish communities of Israel and America there has been little reflection. The confession we Jews should have made, the confession we Jews have to make, won’t be made today.”
Artist Samia Halaby: Israel has never accounted for looted historical art. The Kafr Qasem massacre of 1956 in Israel was followed by the confiscation of Palestinian documentary art of the massacre, as well as art against the Vietnam War.
Atlantic Media names Jeffrey Goldberg as editor-in-chief, and rebrands him by leaving out of his resume his move to Israel, his book about Israel, and all his Middle East reporting that helped pave the way for the disastrous Iraq War.
It was exactly one year ago that Dareen Tatour’s ordeal began. In the pre-dawn hours of October 11, 2015, Israeli police and border guards stormed into Palestinian poet’s family home without a warrant or an explanation for the shocking and disturbing intrusion. They arrested, interrogated, and eventually charged Dareen Tatour with the crime of ‘incitement to violence’ for posts she made on Facebook. A year later, there is no end in sight.
The second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump featured a Muslim voter named Gorbah Hamed who asked Trump about the rise of Islamophobia that coincided with his rhetoric against them. Trump and Clinton sounded similar tones on what responsibility both Muslims have in alerting law enforcement to attacks plotted by fellow Muslims. Trump puts their responsibility in much more hostile terms, but both demand Muslims remain America’s first defense, and cast their inclusion as being essential to defeating terrorism.
UC Berkeley’s cancellation of a course entitled “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis” (since reinstated) is the latest in a series of 43 attacks on academic freedom pertaining to discussion of one foreign state, namely Israel, state a group of over 200 California scholars at 20 institutions.
Israeli new historian Benny Morris writes himself into a scholary cul-de-sac by stating that there was “no ethnic cleansing” by Zionist forces in 1948, after he stated in a 2004 interview that it was “ethnic cleansing” and it was necessary and didn’t go far enough to make peace.
An Israeli police officer and an Israeli woman were shot dead and at least five others were injured in a drive-by shooting near the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah Sunday morning. The gunman, Misbah Abu Sbeih, a native of occupied East Jerusalem, was shot and killed by Israeli police at the scene.
In March, Ramzi Abu Ajamia got word that Israeli forces were looking for him. Terrified of getting arrested, Ramzi stopped sleeping at home and going to school. He succeeded in dodging Israeli forces for five months before he was spotted at clashes during an Israeli night raid on Dheisha refugee camp. Israeli forces spotted the boy on the streets around 1 a.m., and fired. Ramzi was shot in both legs and doctors were only able to remove the two bullets in his right leg. Ramzi underwent six surgeries over the course of a few weeks before he was sent home to recover. Then a few days into Ramzi’s homestay, Israeli forces stormed his house, blasting off the family’s front door before raiding the home and arresting the injured 13-year-old. “That night I had a feeling they would come for me, I was sitting up in my bed waiting,” Ramzi told Mondoweiss, both legs still bandaged and unhealed.
Avigail Abarnabel grew up in Israel and came to view the society as a cult. Here she writes a letter to Israeli Jews explaining why she decided to leave: “I left the cult because I wanted to find out who I was. I refused to accept that the only purpose of my life was to defend the cult and allow it to continue.”