According to the latest poll of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Peace Index 44% of Israelis favor the annexation of the West Bank. 48% of those favoring annexation said this would not require giving Palestinians equal rights of citizenship. From the Index report: “a small but significant minority of the Jewish public supports a situation that the international community regards as apartheid.”
“We betrayed the legacy of the Holocaust when we’re committing acts like this,” Professor Yair Auron says. “To sell weapons to Serbia or to Rwanda during the genocide is similar to selling weapons to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. No country has the right to do it and especially not Israel.” Auron, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the Open University of Israel, is on a mission to bring Israeli officials complicit in the Bosnian genocide to account.
“We’re very careful not to outright oppose BDS,” Wendy Sherman, a Clinton surrogate, told James Zogby during Democratic Party platform deliberations. The tide in favor of Palestinian rights is irreversible, Zogby reports, and in spite of determined resistance from party leaders, the insurgent campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Bernie Sanders in 2016 have solidified progress.
Less than four months after he went to Jerusalem for the New York Times, Peter Baker is going back to the White House. He says it’s the “Trump effect.” The big story is in D.C.
Family foundations of which Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is a director gave $325,860 to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in recent years. The lion’s share of the gifts, about $200,000, were made in two years following the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2008-2009. Trump has suggested that Kushner could mediate peace in the Middle East.
The contrast between the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the Zionists, and the rambunctious visibility of dissent and creative protest of Palestine activism, reveals the gradual weakening of the Zionist grip on the mainstream narrative, which once held Israel to be the victim—a discursive change due in large part to BDS. It is this change that is worrying the Zionist lobby so much that they are resorting more than ever to aggressive censorship and blacklisting.
Lesley Stahl is no Bob Simon, but in her interview with Benjamin Netanyahu aired on “60 Minutes” last night she did mention BDS favorably, “This is the playbook they used against Apartheid in South Africa.” And suggested that Netanyahu is working against the American interest. Reaching out to Russia and China, “You seem to be inching toward an anti-American bloc.”
Over the weekend Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson became the leading candidate to become Secretary of State in the incoming Trump administration. Pro-Israel commentators say his close relationships with OPEC member countries and realists such as Brent Scrowcroft don’t bode well for Israel. But the Trump administration is already triangulating to retain their support with the possible appointment of John Bolton to help run the State Department.
Marking this Brexit-Trump moment, racism and xenophobia threaten anti-Semitism writ large and unsurprisingly in the mix Zionism is conflated with Judaism. That criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism follows. Extraordinary navigation tools are recommended to swim against this political undertow. One such resource is Zionism Unsettled: A Congregational Study Guide, (ZU) published by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church.
Palestinian politician Ziad Abu Ein died 2 years ago after an Israeli border police officer beat him in the chest with his helmet and the butt of his rifle. Last August Israel cleared the officer of any responsibility for the death and yesterday forces dispersed a memorial in the occupied village where he died.