Bill Kristol touts the old neoconservative nostrum, “regime change,” in four countries, Syria, Iran, Russia and North Korea. The leader of Never Trump suddenly likes Trump’s “normal” foreign policy.
Israeli soldiers removed a stone plaque which memorialized a Palestinian girl who was shot dead by Israeli forces in 2015 after she allegedly stabbed an Israeli police officer near the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement. Witnesses said they saw Israeli soldiers smashing the monument, a marble plaque etched with a Qur’an verse, which stated that the Hebron street was renamed after 17-year-old Bayan al-Esseili.
Running for Student Union president at Trinity College Dublin, Kevin Keane said he would support boycott measures against Israel. Now he’s won he’s changed his mind, and Palestinian-solidarity activists feel betrayed, but also empowered.
LitHub wanted Sarah Schulman to remove paragraph about Palestine solidarity from an essay on free speech. She refused, published elsewhere. Her editor stood by her and lost his job. Now everything has been set right…
Obama “assented” to a “holocaust war” in Syria, says Marty Peretz; while Shmuley Boteach says “Trump is in danger of becoming a great man.” And Mort Klein says “Everyone knows that blacks are on average better dancers than other people.” Ever wonder why Zionism has become a dirty word?
Dozens of protesters gathered on a main road in Bethlehem on Friday, demanding the release of several Palestinian bodies being held by Israeli authorities. The Israeli government is refusing to release the bodies of eight Palestinians killed since September 2015 during attempted, alleged, or actual attacks.
Katie Miranda illustrates the hard life of residing in a “tough neighborhood,” where one is forced to shoot locals and drop bombs–“One time one of them threw a rock at me so I had to off the guy. I’m just defending what’s mine.”
Gaza’s libraries have been attacked, there are only 70,000 books available for 1.8 million people. Mosab Abu Toah, a young intellectual who loves English language books, wants to change that with a crowdfunding appeal. Noam Chomsky has gotten behind it.
The New York Times has hired Bret Stephens as a columnist, elevating an Islamophobic neoconservative who regularly pronounces on the “disease of the Arab mind” and the “communal psychosis” of Palestinians, while Israel is blameless.
The trial of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour who faces up to eight years in prison for a poem she wrote continues with expert witnesses testifying about the meanings of her words in translation. Kim Jensen and Yoav Haifawi write “the defense’s overarching objectives were to establish Tatour’s inalienable right to freedom of expression, to point out the distorted police translation of Tatour’s poem, and to demonstrate anti-Arab bias in the judicial system. The contentious hearings started late and dragged into the evening as the prosecutor Alina Hardak spared no attempt to undermine the credibility of the witnesses.”