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January 2017

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The 2017 International Open Shuhada Street Campaign will take place February 19-26. In Hebron there will be film showings, children’s activities, art projects, teach-in’s, and community gatherings. Internationally the campaign will be targeting the Hebron Fund, an American organization with 501c3 charity tax status that raises money to support the illegal settlements in Hebron, and Goldman Sachs for donating to the Hebron Fund. Activists in Hebron ask solidarity partners to hold protests outside the Hebron Fund in Brooklyn and at Goldman Sachs offices across the world.

Hatim Kanaaneh’s village in the Galilee has become known in the Israeli press as a “medical mecca” for the large number of doctors and medical professionals that call it home. Although some want to credit Israel for this, Kanaaneh says it has been accomplished through “resilience, often verging on plasticity,” in the face of institutional and societal discrimination in the Jewish state.

Only four congressional Democrats have been outspoken in support of Obama’s decision to allow a resolution critical of Israeli settlements to pass the UN Security Council, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy, Kentucky Rep John Yarmuth and Illinois Rep Jan Schakowsky. Meanwhile there has been a chorus of denunciation from the likes of even good liberals like Jerrold Nadler, Richard Blumenthal, Hakeem Jeffries, Adam Schiff, Sherrod Brown, and Ron Wyden.

Jewish settlers walk protected by Israeli security forces near Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock mosque in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on Jan. 11, 2016. (Photo: Mahfouz Abu Turk/ APA Images)

Ma‘an reports: 2016 saw the highest number of incursions on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by right-wing Israelis than previous recorded years, according to the Islamic Endowment (Waqf) that manages the holy site. The religious trust said in the statement that a total of 14,806 Israeli settler incursions occurred on the compound in 2016 via the Old City’s Moroccan Gate. These incursions included assaults on employees of the Islamic Waqf, with Israeli forces routinely banning them from entering the holy site.

Terror was vital to the establishment of Israel. David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann planned for large numbers of Arabs to be expelled to assure a Jewish majority. When non-Zionist British Jew Robert Waley Cohen suggested that the new state should be named with a neutral geographic term, ‘Palestine’, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann were horrified at the idea.