Israa Suliman writes from Gaza to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe: “Although we are of different color, religion, culture and place, I have learned, as I read about the protests at Standing Rock, that we have much more in common than differences. When I read your history, I can see myself and my people reflected in yours. I feel in my core that your fight is my fight, and that I am not alone in the battle against injustice.”
Alan Dershowitz has wielded the anti-Semitism charge against any critic of Israel, including Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, and Judge Richard Goldstone, for many years. But he defends Trump advisor Steve Bannon against the charge, saying the evidence must be “overwhelming,” out of a need to suck up to Donald Trump over his Israel policy.
For the farmers in Wadi Qana embracing their land and their agricultural traditions is more than just a lifestyle choice, it’s a form of resistance. By maintaining their presence on the land, they keep settlements and the wall at bay and preserve a traditional Palestinian communal economy that is struggling against eradication.
Opposition to intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in Israel is not confined to the far right. State funds support a shelter to “rescue” Jewish women who are married to “Arabs,” and the idea of conversion is linked to annihilation and betrayal in Hebrew tradition.
Trump’s election is most reminiscent of the Egyptian counter-revolution. Maybe history is not progressive. Maybe cultural advances and economic fairness are not the end point. Maybe history is actually deeply conservative, and majoritarian reactions are going to last a long time in an era of shortages, climate crises and mass migrations.
Benjamin Netanyahu is reported to be anxious about a Trump White House. Why? However hawkish Netanyahu appears to outsiders, he is relatively moderate compared to the rest of his government coalition partners and the Israeli prime minister could find himself outflanked by Naftali Bennett if the Trump administration approves settler demands to annex most or all of the West Bank. Netanyahu’s realization of his Greater Israel dream may prove pyrrhic.
Trump’s combination of rightwing extremism and love for Israel will cause American Jews to come out against the Israeli government and its policies, observers say, thereby accelerating the divide between liberal American Jews and the Jewish state, which is practicing apartheid.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected on the promise that Palestinians would never have their own independent state, and now even the most powerful pro-Israel organization in the U.S. appears to be changing its rhetoric on the two-state solution. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, scrubbed a reference to the two-state solution from talking points on its website.
Gideon Levy & Alex Levac report for Haaretz: It was a pogrom. The survivors are five congenial Palestinian farmers who speak broken Hebrew and work in construction in Israel, with valid entry permits. They are convinced that they survived last Saturday’s attack only by a miracle. “We will kill you!” the assailants shouted, as they beat the men over the head and on their bodies with clubs and iron pipes, and brandished serrated knives. The only “crime” of the Palestinians, who were in the midst of harvesting their olives when the settlers swooped down on them, was that they were Palestinians who had the temerity to work their land.
At Seattle’s Temple de Hirsch Sinai, Sunday night there was a mournful gathering to respond to the election of Donald J. Trump. Speakers promised the organized Jewish institutions will be in solidarity with Seattle minorities and new immigrants, amid fears for us all.