Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair shared a cartoon on Facebook detailing George Soros running the world, particularly his family’s opponents, with anti-Semitic overtones: images of Reptilians and Masons and Illuminati.
“Boycotts have always been accepted as a legitimate form of nonviolent protest in the United States,” musician Roger Waters writes in the New York Times, from Montgomery, Alabama, buses to the North Carolina transgender restrictions. So it is perfectly legitimate to use this tool against Israel’s occupation. Waters’s 64-city tour has been marked by pro-Israel demonstrators.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is a co-sponsor of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act that the Israel lobby has pushed in Congress, and she claims to be a supporter of human rights and free speech. Several of her constituents meet with a Cantwell staffer to explain that the boycott movement is trying to free Palestinians living under occupation and is not anti-Semitic.
Invoking Yasser Arafat and his own niece Smadar Elhanan, killed by a suicide bomber, Miko Peled calls on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to release Issa Amro, who has almost singlehandedly defended an occupied Palestinian neighborhood of Hebron from Jewish colonists.
Novelist Nathan Englander has a new political thriller called “Dinner at the Center of the World,” based on his efforts to imagine peace between Israel and Palestine, but asked if Israel should give up its character as a Jewish state and be a democracy, he says, “I’m a fiction writer… I have never even thought about having to take a personal stand like that as being imperative upon me.”
A rightwing campaign has begun against a Jewish organization, the Center for Jewish History, to fire its new executive David N. Myers, who has called for discussions of the Nakba and against demonizing the BDS campaign (boycott, divestment and sanctions). And happily, it appears that this campaign will fail.
Kim Jensen reports on a town hall meeting with Maryland Senator Ben Cardin that was taken over by protesters opposed to his support for the Israel Anti-Boycott Act — under which businesses, organizations, and even individuals who join in the international movement to boycott and divest from the state of Israel can potentially face astronomical fines and even jail time. Jensen writes, “Senator Cardin has a clear choice before him. He can continue to dance and dodge his way down the unethical and undemocratic path of representing the interests of AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby, or he can listen to his constituents and the respected lawyers of the ACLU,and kill this bill. He can’t have it both ways.”
When Seth Anderson urges us to see international law and the two state solution as the basis for resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict, he ignores the fact that the law has meant nothing in the context of power politics, and that partition would create Palestinian bantustans and leave intact the discriminatory structure of the so-called Jewish state. So writes Tony Greenstein.
In recent days, the mainstream press has been full of reports of the dire plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar that is currently being ethnically cleansed by the Burmese military. What has not been reported in the mainstream news is the fact that, even during this ongoing genocidal campaign against its Muslim population, Myanmar has been supplied with weaponry by Israel.
As a lorry earmarked for London’s weapons fair approaches, a group of people suddenly hold hands and start Palestinian Dabke dancing in the road. A police officer tries to get people to move but inadvertently finds himself in the middle of a circle of dancing activists. Lydia Noon reports from the first day of resistance to Britain’s Defence and Security Equipment International weapons fair where local activists, grassroots and faith groups protested Israel’s presence at the conference.