After a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, Ghassan John Tarazi writes, “Two glaring parallels between the experiences of Palestinians and African Americans are the condescending attitude of exceptionalism among the oppressors and their blatant and subtle dehumanization of the oppressed. This is the toxic and malignant foundation on which the ‘legal’ oppression takes place – in both the United States and Palestine/Israel.”
Many of us are surely lacking in knowledge of the Holocaust– including White House reporters. You can see from Sean Spicer’s infamous press briefing where after he made his gaffe about Hitler not using chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad had allegedly done in Syria, 12 minutes went by and Spicer fielded 16 questions on matters such as North Korea, Ivanka Trump, and tax policy before Cecilia Vega of ABC brought up his comment, apparently because it was blowing up on Twitter.
Israel is an overwhelmingly right-wing nation, says Larry Derfner in his new memoir. “Despite what sentimental liberals like to believe, it’s not the big bad Israeli leaders who drag the peace-loving public to battle; it’s much closer to being the other way around.”
Matt Katz of WNYC extols a Haggadah that defies Trump over refugees’ rights without mentioning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian refugees. The double standard is obvious, and damaging.
Ma’an News Agency reports, “The Israeli government has admitted to losing the remains of seven Palestinians who were killed while ‘committing attacks’ against Israelis during the Second Intifada, Israeli news daily Haaretz reported on Monday. According to Haaretz, the admission came from the Israeli state prosecutor’s office in response to petitions to Israel’s Supreme Court filed by the slain Palestinians’ families, demanding the return of the bodies. During a Supreme Court session last month, it was revealed that the number of Palestinians whose burial places are unknown is far higher than the seven that Israel has admitted to losing. Haaretz quoted Israeli prosecutors as saying that as of 2015, out of 123 petitions submitted by Palestinian families, only two bodies had been located.”
Donna Nevel provides an overview of speakers and panels at the Jewish Voice for Peace National Membership Meeting in Chicago last weekend, “Presenters spoke movingly and, at times, quite painfully, about the brutal realities and challenges Palestinians and many other communities are facing at this moment and also located the current moment in the context of a long history of injustice and struggle.”
White House spokesman Sean Spencer was comparing Assad to Hitler yesterday, unfavorably so: “You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons”, he said. Oops, that was bad. But it got worse.
From Tzipi Livni to Moshe Ya’alon to Yair Lapid, Israeli leaders have expressed contempt for the lives of children targeted in Israel’s wars. That makes the allegations of massacres in Syria, and the U.S. missile attack there, very useful.
Robert Cohen recommends adding a recent UN report on Israeli practices of “apartheid” into the family Haggadah, writing, “Passover is the most popular and well observed of all Jewish festivals. This year’s eight day celebration of redemption, liberation and religious and political freedom begins on Monday 10th April. But long ago our uncritical commitment to the project of Jewish nationalism began to undermine it. So much so, that Passover today has become little more than an annual act of communal hypocrisy. And in this year of bitter anniversaries (Balfour, the UN partition plan, the Occupation of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza) we’ll be taking that hypocrisy to depressingly new heights.”
Students disrupted a Brand Israel conference at New York University, holding a silent protest while former Israeli ambassador Ido Aharoni closed the daylong forum last Friday with a summary of branding techniques applicable to the Jewish state.