Israeli leaders were not only contemplating ethnic cleansing, but also Genocide, according to declassified governmental minutes from 1967. Labor politicians were obsessed with the fear that the 1.4 million Palestinians in the territories they had seized would overwhelm the state’s Jewish majority one day. And these liberal Zionists encouraged the settlements, too.
Speaking to a conference on settler population growth in the West Bank titled “On the Way to a Million,” Jerusalem Affairs Minister Ze’ev Elkin dismissed the idea of a Palestinian state, “Halas [‘enough’ in Arabic] with the story of two states. There is no other option but the state of Israel, certainly between the Jordan [River] to the [Mediterranean] sea there will be one state.”
Over half of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank has been declared an active military “firing zone” by the Israeli army. The Israeli military conducts military exercises in these areas, even if Palestinian villages still exist there. Ibziq is one such village. Uday Nawaja’a was recently killed there while tending to a flock of goats after stumbling upon an unexploded ordnance left behind by the Israeli army. “I was tending to the flock, as Uday was wandering underneath a tree, about 30 meters away,” Nawaja’a’s uncle told Mondoweiss. “Suddenly, I heard an explosion. I ran over to Uday to see what happened. But a few seconds later, he was dead.”
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens says that Jewish Voice for Peace is as anti-Semitic as white nationalists like Richard Spencer because it undermines “Israel’s right to exist.” This is a clever feat of propaganda for Israel: Stephens is saying that Israel has a right to discriminate against Palestinians. People need to call it out as racist claptrap.
Amirah Abu Lughod writes, “According to most people’s definition, Yaffa is a beautiful city – sea side views, a bustling shopping scene, an artist’s village, restaurants everywhere you turn. I found myself struggling to see the beauty. I knew what I was seeing was nothing like the Yaffa my grandparents called home and what did resemble their existence there felt like a restoration of mockery. It looks nothing like what my ancestors called home because my ancestors were those people who lived on ‘the land with no people for a people with no land.'”
The tag team of Benjamin Netanyahu and former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro springs into action on Iranian earthquake. “Our humanity is greater than their hatred,” Netanyahu says of Iran. And Shapiro echoes, “Sadly, Iran hates Israel more than it wants to find earthquake victims.”
Salwa Salem-Copty hopes to someday return to live in her family’s village in the north of Israel, but at 70 years old, she thinks it is unlikely. Instead she has one request — she would like to be allowed to visit the grave of her father, who was killed when a bus full of workers traveling to Haifa was attacked in April 1948. Salwa was never allowed to visit her father’s grave. Today, now a grandmother, she is still fighting for that right.
Ron Brummer of the Israeli Ministry for Strategic Affairs says there’s no point in just boycotting the settlements because there’s only one economy between the river and the sea. “If you want to divest from the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, you have to divest from Israel, which means you boycott Israel completely.”
Steven Salaita visits Hawaii to learn more about Kanaka Maoli resistance and to converse with local activists and intellectuals about Palestine. He writes, “Enough commonalities exist among the two nations for a shared political project: both suffer military occupation, land theft, foreign settlement, and structural racism. In fact, they contest the same colonial apparatus. This point may seem counterintuitive, but these days the United States and Israel differ only according to technicalities of nomenclature and color scheme. Collusion between the US and Israel is by now axiomatic. People needn’t be identical to know that it is foolish to oppose one of those powers while ignoring the other.”
Brisbane musicians rework Nick Cave’s classic ballad “The Ship Song” to call on him to cancel his upcoming shows in Israel and respect the Palestinian picket line. #BDS