In a recent video, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu slammed the new Hamas charter saying, “[Hamas] brainwashes kids inside suicide camps,” before throwing the document in a trash can. But Jonathan Ofir asks – what about the ways Israeli institutions are brainwashing children to hate Palestinians?
On Sunday evening, dozens of Seattle residents gathered outside Town Hall where Mayor Ed Murray received an award for his Israel advocacy from Stand With Us, a group that does public relations for a conservative agenda supporting the Occupation of Palestine. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and Voices for Palestine gathered outside, holding signs such as “No More Fake Progressive Mayors” and “Stop the IDF.” Inside, four Jewish Queer people disrupted Mayor Murray’s acceptance speech, drawing attention to Mayor Murray’s deep connection with a conservative agenda in Israel and his support for militarism and systemic racism both in Seattle and in Israel.
The mockery campaign against Marwan Barghouti and the hunger strikers has brought Israeli political culture to a new depth of dehumanization. Pizza Hut ran a mock campaign on its Facebook page yesterday, using a still caption of Barghouti on the toilet, with a banner saying “Barghouti, if you’re going to break a strike, isn’t pizza better?” – the meme added a pizza box on the floor
As the mass hunger strike by Palestinians in Israeli prisons is in its critical fourth week the BDS movement calls for intensifying boycott campaigns to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people.
An “aggressive campaign of silencing, which we know too well from the extremist fringe in Israel, has made its way to the American Jewish community as well,” singer Noa says after synagogue in Detroit suburb cancels her May 18 concert after threats from rightwing Jews.
Israel commits serious human rights violations, Bernie Sanders says at the Carter Center, defending his signing on to a letter attacking the UN for singling out Israel for condemnation.
Al Jazeera reports Israeli lawmakers will soon vote on a bill that strikes Arabic from the list of official languages, “Israeli ministers have approved a controversial bill that will downgrade Arabic as an official language and define the country as the ‘national home of the Jewish people.’ Ayman Odeh, a parliament member who heads the mainly Arab Joint List alliance, said approving the bill would mean trampling on minority rights, adding it would ‘legally transform us into second-class citizens’.”
Tikva Honig-Parnass challenges the widely accepted claim that the nature of Zionist settler colonization is unique: “The class analysis of the colonial group itself, reveals features of Zionism to be similar to those of other colonial projects, including apartheid South Africa, with which comparisons are often made. These projects seek to dispossess and subdue the indigenous people, and whenever needed, exploit their cheap labour for the benefit of capital. Capitalist class interests dominate the colonial states’ “peaceful resolution” of the conflicts with the colonized, aiming to retain the rule of capital and, in the globalized era, to enable economic neoliberalism.”
Israeli Prison Services released footage of hunger strike leader Marwan Barghouti supposedly breaking the strike by eating a snack on the toilet. There seems to be no bottom to the abyss Israel is willing to sink to in its desperation to save its image against the current Palestinian hunger strike.
Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed Saba’aneh, now on a book tour in the US, spent five months in an Israeli prison, so he knows why 1600 prisoners are staging a hunger strike, and how much their families are suffering. Saba’aneh threw himself into documenting prison conditions during his solitary confinement.