A young Palestinian photographer in Gaza exhibited his work last week in a location that highlights both the ancestral food cultures of the Strip as well as the daily threat posed by Israeli siege and occupation – a Palestinian fishing boat in Gaza City’s harbor. Khalid Hashem Abu al-Jedian’s photographs were taken as he accompanied the fishermen of Gaza on their hazardous daily journeys into the sea, where Gaza’s traditional fishery is boxed in on all sides by Israeli siege, enforced by gunships.

At a Princeton conference on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Phil Weiss meets British philosophy fellow Brian Klug, who describes his decision to become a vegetarian 30 years ago, which he wrote about in his book Being Jewish and Doing Justice. On a subsequent visit to Jerusalem, Phil makes a similar decision, out of a sense of personal responsibility.

When white nationalist Richard Spencer said there was a lot to admire in Zionism, he held up a mirror to Jewish nationalism’s contempt for Palestinian rights. Naomi Dann of Jewish Voice for Peace was right to seize on the affinity as a reflection on Zionism, as lived. While Jane Eisner of the Forward and Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL are in denial about what their ideology has become.

An Israeli military order granting official administrative status to Jewish settlers in Hebron violates the 20-year-old Hebron agreement struck between Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu. “This order is against everything we’ve made here, it’s against all the agreements, all the treaties and older orders we have worked hard to slowly establish,” Bassam Shweiki, a Palestinian leader, says.

Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, refers to an “alleged occupation” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, and says settlements pose no real obstacle to peace but Palestinians’ “culture of hate” does. Once again, the White House acts as Israel’s lawyer.

Israeli forces raided the occupied village of Beit Rima overnight and detained popular wedding singer Muhammad Barghouthi for song glorifying Omar al-Abed, who allegedly killed three settlers. Two members of Barghouthi’s band were also detained.

The discussion over the essential racism of Zionism is in the open. Israeli Justice minister Ayelet Shaked made it clear, and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy thanks her for her candidness. Levy published a column in Haaretz yesterday that all but says Zionism is racism. He calls it a movement that “contradicts human rights, and is thus indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain”. 

Israeli education minister Naftali Bennett coined a better word for “self-hating Jew” — “auto-anti-Semite.” We come up with a checklist of 10 signs for Jews that you are showing insufficient love of the Jewish people and need to get deprogrammed, beginning with, “You don’t look at old movies and tell your partner, You know, his real name was Julius Garfinkle!”

The confluence of fascism and Zionism is becoming more obvious by the day, with alt-right leader Richard Spencer describing himself as a “white Zionist,” while the Zionist Organization of American invites Steve Bannon as a speaker at its annual gala.  And as the two forms of racial supremacy merge seamlessly together, the Palestinian struggle for human rights and dignity can set the model for discursive changes, the rejection of racism as status-quo, no matter how powerfully endorsed by the state and its militarized apparatus, and an understanding that together we are greater than the sum of our parts.

Conan O’Brien didn’t just flout the calls on artists to boycott Israel, he mock-trained with the Israeli army, making light of their deadly arms, and hung out with Benjamin Netanyahu, doing dog jokes at the Prime Minister’s house. “Conan in Israel” will air in September, but the damage to O’Brien’s brand is already happening, on social media.