Palestinian Sami Awad reflects on taking part in the Sumud Freedom Camp with more than 100 diaspora Jews, “I joined and continue to be part of this movement because it has also triggered in my soul something bigger than Sarura, more sacred than my political rights as a Palestinian, and more profound than reaching a political settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It has connected me to a new and emerging global movement that in its newness is also deeply rooted in our deepest understanding of our human history and our humanity.”

For the moment, swimming in beaches in southern Israel is banned indefinitely after pollution from Gaza made it way north following an electricity crisis where the absence of power has shut down the Strip’s only sewage treatment plant. Haaretz reports, “Beaches in southern Israel were closed to swimmers on Wednesday due to pollution, after power shortages in nearby Gaza led a sewage treatment plant there to shut down. The electricity shortages in the Gaza Strip appear to have caused untreated sewage to flow just over the border into Israel’s Mediterranean waters. The Health Ministry banned swimming on the beaches at Zikim and Ashkelon National Park after sewage was detected in the water. Officials suspect that the pollution is sewage that was left untreated after the plant was shuttered due to severe electricity shortages in Gaza, and that it drifted north onto Israeli beaches. There is no forecast as to when the beaches will reopen.”

After an article quoting a science fiction writer making a mistake that any high school science nerd would spot — the energy of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs — the New York Times corrects the error, but does so in a way calculated not to reveal the sloppiness of the original.

Whatever happened to the biblical command to bear witness? A dozen US rabbis are shocked by what they see in occupied Hebron, but they don’t want their names to appear in Haaretz lest their congregations back home get upset with them.

America has been at war for 15 years but few Americans notice, because overall it is rural communities that have suffered the highest casualty rates, Francis Shen and Douglas Kriner argue in an important new paper. And it was those communities, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, that gave Donald Trump his victory over Hillary Clinton, who was seen as pro-war.

Kim Jensen reviews We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics, Edited by William I. Robinson and Maryam S. Griffin: “Across the breadth of these infuriating yet illuminating essays, a consistent pattern of tactics emerges. Most of these tactics are predicated on the lobby’s willingness to breach basic standards of academic freedom and common decency to achieve their aims.”

“Perhaps instead of the Taylor Force Act, Congress should bring some other bills to the floor—bills that would begin to address the real problems in Israel/Palestine. Here are a few suggestions,” writes Kathryn Shihadah, “We could start with the Rachel Corrie Act, prohibiting the U.S. from giving aid to countries that practice home demolitions. Rachel Corrie was killed in 2003 as she worked in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Rachel, clearly visible with a neon vest and bullhorn, confronted an IDF soldier on a bulldozer, about to demolish the home of a Palestinian pharmacist, when she was run over in what is widely believed to be a deliberate act.”

Imad Abu Shamsiya, the Palestinian videographer who documented an Israeli medic killing an incapacitated Palestinian last year, appeals to the world to give the siege of Hebron more attention so that conditions for those under occupation improve.

Israel adds a new measure of collective punishment on top of house demolition and deportation – and sues a Palestinian family for its expenses of tombstones and grants to slain soldiers’ families. But when the Abu Khdeir family seeks to punish the families of Jewish terrorists who killed him– nothing doing.

In a letter made public today, over 60 theater artists have called on Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a leading U.S. arts institution located in Manhattan, to cancel Israeli government-sponsored performances by two Israeli theater companies scheduled for July 24–27. The signers of the letter have won numerous awards for their work in theater, including four Pulitzer Prizes, three Tony Awards, and nine Obie Awards. The letter signed by the artists asserts that the performances by Israel’s Ha’bima National Theatre and the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv will help “the Israeli government to implement its systematic ‘Brand Israel’ strategy of employing arts and culture to divert attention from the state’s decades of violent colonization, brutal military occupation and denial of basic rights to the Palestinian people.”