Radhika Sainath of Palestine Legal: “There’s a lot of writing these days about the Left being oversensitive crybabies that can’t handle free speech. Students shutting down racists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray at the University of California Berkeley and Middlebury in Vermont made headlines in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Fox News.” But Sainath argues the real forces with the most successes in shutting down free speech do not come from the Left, but far-right Zionist organizations that have pressured universities into firing employees and changing curriculums.

Palestinian activist Yazan Khader writes, “IfNotNow is a very effective group. It has managed to ignite a stagnant conversation within the American Jewish community. For myself and many other Palestinians, their work is a cause for refreshing optimism. But it would be wrong to assume that they are without blemish. To succeed, and to succeed well, IfNotNow should begin talking to Palestinians, not in a way that takes away from their potency as an anti-occupation group working within the Jewish community, but in a manner that guides it.”

Conference on Israel’s responsibility to international law is held in Cork, Ireland. In what Professor Oren Ben-Dor described as a “spectacular failure of the protection of basic rights,” pro-Israeli censors had successfully blocked the conference twice in the UK, and nearly sabotaged it in Cork.

Trump strike on Syria leads Chuck Schumer and Netanyahu to cheer him, neocon Elliott Abrams to liken him to Kennedy and Reagan, while Steve Walt says air strikes are “easy way to look tough w/o fixing anything.”

“We are in a post-political era in this country. The central, over-riding political fact of national life, the occupation, is no longer a subject for discussion,” Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society in his new book “No Country for Jewish Liberals”. Read an extended excerpt here.

After three years of cancellation after cancellation the “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism” conference finally takes place in Cork Ireland. DeeDee Halleck writes, “For many of the attendees, the timing this spring couldn’t have been better. The ascendancy of the right wing in Europe and the United States and the recent vociferous reactions to the UN report by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley made the discussions all the more timely and necessary. The warm Irish welcome was such that the first two days were actually held in the atrium auditorium of Cork’s City Hall. The sessions were packed at both City Hall and the Sunday session at the University of Cork. Although there was security hired by conference organizers, there were no violent incidents, nor even any sustained complaints from the audience. The only sustained reactions were the enthusiastic applause outbursts whenever the courage and persistence of the conference organizers was mentioned.”

Bassel al-Araj, the Palestinian writer killed in March by Israel, believed that words can be a fortress to the nation, and achieve victories. He is sure to become a revolutionary icon for Palestinian youth.

Two days ago, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was sentenced to another year of suspension after a hearing by the Labour Party’s national constitutional committee (NCC) concerning his remarks on Hitler’s temporary support for Zionism. This never happened to Benjamin Netanyahu when he manipulated the history of the Holocaust. Discrediting Livingstone is necessary to preserve Zionism’s rosy image.

Jewish Israelis maintain the occupation because they know they will only lose under a one-state or two-state outcome, and so they have elected the perfect choice in Netanyahu to maintain that immoral system of complete control over Palestinians, depriving them of rights, Noam Sheizaf said at a Bay Area synagogue last week. And they may get away with it.

Iris Keltz was shocked when she first heard leaders of the Jewish community in Albuquerque denounce the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement started by Palestinians. “Call me naive, but considering Israelis had been living under the threat of bombs exploding on buses, in shopping malls, restaurants, and other public places, there should have been a collective sigh of relief when Palestinian civil society chose a non-violent means to resist a fifty year old military occupation.”