The United States and Israel announced on Thursday they were quitting the U.N.’s cultural agency UNESCO, after Washington accused it of anti-Israeli bias. Washington has already withheld its funding for UNESCO since 2011, when the body admitted Palestine as a full member.

Abby Smardon says her sixth visit to Gaza this summer was the worst. A five-year-old boy in Gaza died from a brain disease caused by bacteria in the sea, contaminated by sewage. An 11-year-old girl attempted suicide. The 2 million people of Gaza are collateral damage in a cruel political game.

Saturday, October 21, Mondoweiss Founder and Co-Editor Phil Weiss will be among several speakers addressing a conference in Minneapolis called “Parallel Liberation Struggles: Lessons in Resistance.” Themes of the conference, organized by a broad coalition of Twin Cities organizations, are the 100-year Palestinian resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project and the similarities in violence used against Palestinians, African Americans, and Native Americans and their methods of resistance.

Imagine that Italian fascists argued that anti-fascism is anti-Italian prejudice? That is what Zionists do in the name of Judaism. No other political interest group regularly demands, through bullying, social and professional slander, and orchestrated campaigns of ostracism, that we accept their particular ideology as per se legitimate and lovable.

Miko Peled says that you cannot believe in free speech and then say that it is criminal to deny the Holocaust. And he says that racists should be denied platforms on the left– and that includes Zionists.

Devyn Springer says there is a clear pattern to how pro-Israel supporters attempt to discredit Black advocates for Palestine: “whether it is local rabbis blasting Black Lives Matter activists as ‘ignorant’ for including support of BDS in their demands, Zionist white feminists attacking the women’s movement for standing against Zionism, or the coded language against Alice Walker and NFL players that assumes they simply ‘don’t know what they’re talking about.’ The pattern is the use of anti-Black rhetoric and, in turn, anti-Blackness in whole, to perpetuate the assumption of Black ignorance to silence and belittle Black BDS advocates.”

Two victims of censorship by the American Jewish Historical Society say they’ll mount their events anyway. Dan Fishback is raising money for his play on rifts in the Jewish community. Lawyer Jonathan Kuttab says, “If we fold and play dead then they will get away with it without paying any political price.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he will approve a bonanza of new settlements in the West Bank in the coming days, bringing the year-end total to 6,500, nearly three times the number of settlements approved in all of 2016.

Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation deal on Thursday during talks in Cairo. Reports of the agreement lack specific details on what exactly was agreed upon, with Fatah only officially confirming it will take over control of the Gaza-Egypt border. Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political scientist at Birzeit University, tells Mondoweiss the hard work lies ahead. “Inviting the PA to work in Gaza without a full agreement, is nothing more than a trap,” Khatib said.

Miko Peled’s suggestion at a British Labour conference that “Holocaust: yes or no” should be open to debate, has thrown raw meat to Holocaust deniers as well as Israel apologists. Even as he says that Zionism should not be debated.