A group of Israeli settlers from the infamously extremist Yitzhar settlement in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus uprooted 27 olive trees near the village of Burin on Wednesday. Last week settlers from Rechelim destroyed 43 olive trees in occupied al-Sawiya.

“Most of the people who specialize in this subject agree that we’re probably going to end up in a situation where North Korea has nuclear weapons. It is a nuclear state, and we learn to co-exist with it.” –Evan Osnos of The New Yorker on Fresh Air. So why isn’t containment a policy for Iran, too?

“The status quo is no longer tenable.” Nearly 600 Conservative rabbis and leaders, most of them North American, wrote a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu expressing “dismay, anger and sense of betrayal” over official Israeli discrimination against non-Orthodox Jews. But not a word about Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians.

Reviewing Mya Guarnieri Jaradat’s book “The Unchosen: the lives of Israel’s others,” Max Ajl writes, “In her reporting, Jaradat has shown clinically how the social structure produces racism with such mechanical regularity. She shows a picture of Israeli society which not merely exposes its brutal racism and colonialism, but also how racism and power function within the dominant Jewish sector. It so doing she undermines an important myth of the Ashkenazi elite, which is that the racism which courses through Israel is somehow not the fruit of colonialism, but is primarily the fault of Russians, Mizrahi, or others–tainting what had been untainted. This is important work, and where The Unchosen makes its most important contribution.”

North Korea is helping Iran to become a threshold nuclear state, and Syria too, so “there needs to be an alliance against the axis of evil” between Israel and the U.S., says Israel Labor pol Erel Margalit speaking at Columbia University. Haven’t we heard that before?

The Arab League on Sunday approved the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) request to create a committee aimed at stopping the State of Israel’s bid to become one of the ten non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UN SC) — a mere day before the Israel-Africa Summit in Togo was called off amid growing pressure.

Amira Hass reports that Israel has quietly ended one-year visas to foreign spouses married to Palestinians, “In recent months, Eva and other citizens of foreign countries who are married to Palestinian residents of the West Bank have noticed that Israel has been putting more limits on their ability to stay put. Another woman, Dora, says that after years of being issued visas (officially called “visitor permits”) that were valid for a year, suddenly, with no explanation, she received a visa that was only good for a few weeks. Other women, who not long ago received visas valid for six or seven months, have recently been given visas valid for just over two weeks and which must be renewed over and over.”

Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy has opined that Israeli Justice Minister Shaked’s words about Zionism being in opposition to individual rights, are true. His colleague Rogel Alpher opines she is a fascist comparable to Mussolini. The combined logic of these two assertions is, Zionism is a fascist ideology.

Jewish identity is fluid. It adopted Zionism, now it must drop Zionism, Robert Cohen writes. “The longer we cling to the fiction of two-states and the belief that Zionism is not merely an ideology but a part of our faith and identity, the longer it will take to bring anything approaching peace with justice to the land.”

Israeli Communications Minister Ayoub Kara is supposedly following the line of Arab states in his effort to shut down Al Jazeera, but really, he’s Netanyahu’s puppet. Netanyahu intervened this week to prevent Al Jazeera Jerusalem Bureau chief Walid al-Omari from appearing on a government panel on the limits of free speech.