British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim says BDS is the only resource Palestinians have to make progress today, and the Israeli government is taking it very seriously. He was born in Iraq and says Arab Jews also were “victims of Zionism… There was a Jewish community in Iraq which had been there for two and a half millennia, and had no wish to leave.”
Nearly 100 activists with the New York City chapter of grassroots organization Jewish Voice for…
Simon Schama’s defense of Zionism in a letter to the Times of London is not worthy of his standing as a historian, Robert Cohen writes. “Your denial of any connection between colonialism and Zionism makes me seriously question your historical understanding…. If you truly recognise the equal Palestinian claim to the land you must also understand Zionism was always going to turn out badly for the Palestinians.”
Stella Penn Pechanac, the Israeli actress identified as the spy for disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein who duped his accuser, actress Rose McGowan, immigrated from Bosnia to Israel with her family in 1994, helped by a Jewish family whose forbears were hidden during the Holocaust by Stella’s grandmother, who died in a concentration camp.
A five-year long study published this week in Science shows that small independent news outlets can have a dramatic effect on the national conversation. Mondoweiss participated in a research project conducted by Harvard Professor Gary King that found that if just three outlets write about a particular major national policy topic – such as jobs, the environment or immigration – discussion of that topic across social media rose by as much as 62.7 percent. This study proves is that when independent news outlets work together they can have a mighty effect.
Israeli musicians write Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to ask them to cancel their upcoming show in Israel: “Israel prides itself for being tolerant and culturally open, but in fact uses culture to limit divergent narratives and voices, and to whitewash its crimes. When performing in Israel one should always remember that they play in a country that discriminates huge populations of invisible people that have no citizenship and no freedom of movement, and are subject to a separate (military) court system. When performing in Israel one should always remember that they play only in front of the privileged. By choosing not to perform you can send them a strong message.”
Over the past year, some 16,000 applications to leave Gaza have piled up at the Israeli Liaison Office and still await a reply.
British government minister Priti Patel was forced to resign following revelations she conducted 12 undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Patel’s behavior has been characterized in the British press as “incompetence,” but Jonathan Cook unpacks what she, and Israel, might have been trying to achieve.
The press is obsessed with the claim that absurd ads planted by Russians on Facebook bashing Hillary Clinton actually swayed the election. This is a form of propaganda about “our democracy,” exposed by the fact that our press fails to report on Saudi and Israeli meddling in our politics, a real factor in Washington. And though quick to seize on Russian war crimes, it has almost nothing to say about Saudi atrocities in Yemen, backed by the U.S. government.
Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak hooked Harvey Weinstein up with a firm composed of former Israeli spies that he used over the last year to try and suppress publication of accusations of sexual assault and harassment, the New Yorker reports. The firm’s work on “reputational management and political persecution” is a far cry from the derring-do associated with Israeli spies.