“One has to be brave to participate in non-violent dissent, and unfortunately there are many more decent than brave people,” says Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard. “Israeli politicians are afraid,” and there have been a “tsunami of bills to close the democratic space available to us.”
There is no space for Zionism in any movement which seeks to alleviate even an iota of oppression from marginalized people. There is no space, no room should be made, no platform to be held, for Zionism, which is diametrically opposed to intersectional feminism, both in theory and praxis.
The intolerant Israeli government ban on foreign visitors who support boycott only strengthens the boycott movement, says Michael Walzer, the Princeton scholar. Some supporters of limited boycott are telling him, “We might as well support BDS.”
The new white-supremacists have found a model that happened to be created by a certain stream of Jews – the ‘strong Jews’ of Zionism. And the advantage that this alliance creates is far more substantial in realpolitik terms for those power-seeking white-supremacists, than the redundant old anti-Semitism.
At a Brooklyn synagogue NYT reporter Joseph Goldstein says “alt right” is obsessed with losing a white majority in the US; while Seffi Kogen of AJC says that the “alt left” is anti-semitic because it supports BDS — though some Jews do so out of “love.”
The thrust of Shimon Dotan’s documentary, The Settlers, is that Israel as a polity/society has gone deeply wrong in this program of religious colonial supremacy that has broad popular support.
In a hotly contested session of Knesset, Israeli lawmakers passed the first reading of a bill to ban the Muslim call to prayer, sparking Arab representatives to walk-out mid-session. Al Jazeera reports, “A law to muffle mosques’ amplified calls to prayer in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem won preliminary approval on Wednesday in a charged parliamentary session where Palestinian legislators denounced the measure as racist. The bill passed a preliminary reading with 55 votes in favour and 48 against as the assembly broke out into chaotic arguments.”
A wide coalition of Palestinian and international organizations denounced FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s failure to compel Israel’s national football league to exclude six football teams based in illegal Israeli settlements and called for the dissolution of the FIFA Monitoring Committee Israel-Palestine.
On March 8, women in Gaza marked International Women’s Day along with their counterparts in the countries across the globe. But in Gaza, International Women’s Day is less of a celebration and more of a harsh and painful reminder of three wars in the last decade, and years of siege. Laila Qarmout, 57, a member of the General Union of Palestinian Women said: “Women are indoctrinated from the age of five to see ourselves as less than our brothers or less than our husbands. Despite this, we have struggled a lot against the world’s only long-running occupation. Women know too well the iniquity of repression.”
Steve Bannon figured out he needed to put lipstick on Donald Trump’s piggish Muslim ban