“Israel is the single most divisive issue in the American community pitting American Jew against American Jew,” says Eric Goldstein, CEO of the Jewish Federation of New York. While Jonathan Kessler, an executive at AIPAC, said Israeli leaders’ ignorance of U.S. politics is “dangerous” and young US Jews are growing estranged from the country.
Israeli police entered Zahwat al-Quds school in occupied East Jerusalem on Monday, arresting the principal of the school as well as three teachers in front of students, before closing down the school. The arrests came one day after Israeli forces detained several teachers in the southern Hebron Hills on their walk to school, again in the presence of their students.
Tzipi Hotovely, deputy Israeli foreign minister, says American Jews are threatening the existence of Jewry with “80 percent” rate of assimilation, and criticism of Israel, which is all that holds Jews together. Then she challenges Labor parliamentarian Merav Michaeli, “When’s the last time you went to the Kotel [the western wall], can you possibly tell me?”
Israeli authorities announced on Sunday evening that Israeli forces recovered the bodies of five missing Palestinians who had been trapped, without access to rescue crews, in a tunnel bombed by Israeli forces on Oct. 30. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights had filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court demanding official Palestinian emergency responders be allowed to carry out a rescue mission but never received a response. Adalah Attorney Muna Haddad said preventing rescue crews from entering the bombed area when people were known to be trapped in rubble, could constitute a war crime.
Mainstream U.S. press coverage of government corruption in Africa is all too often marred by unconscious racism. Reports dwell at loving length on the grotesque wealth of certain African leaders, but the same articles will often forget to even name the big oil companies, mining giants and hedge funds that pay and sometimes bribe them.
Olive branches, a huge Palestinian flag, a large cardboard drawing of Lord Arthur Balfour, and Theresa May cartoons were some of the creative props displayed during the 15,000-strong ‘Justice Now: Make it Right for Palestine’ march and rally in London to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.
Tom Rollins reports for Al Jazeera: “Yarmouk camp remains open to the dead and closed to the living. This is the ironic reality in the southern Damascus camp for Palestinian refugees, which has been under partial or total siege since late 2012, barring most residents from exit and re-entry. Yarmouk has all but emptied since then, with multiple attacks causing mass displacements. Hundreds of Palestinians have died in and around Yarmouk in recent years, either as a result of starvation or a lack of access to medical supplies. But through a complex bureaucratic process, those who died outside of the camp have been able to secure burial within its borders.”
Sedq, an international Jewish network for Justice has recently launched a Facebook campaign asking people around the world, and especially in the Jewish Communities, to call and write Israeli embassies and demand Israel stops its arms sales to Myanmar.
Women of the social action committee at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead MA refuse to bend to organized Jewish community’s pressure to shut down a screening on Sunday Nov. 5 of “The Occupation of the American Mind”– which depicts the limits on discussion of the Palestinian human rights issue in the U.S. Protesters describe the film as anti-Semitic, though it includes Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, and Rula Jebreal and is endorsed by Doug Rushkoff and Medea Benjamin.
Shortly after Israel apologist Prof. Alan Dershowitz spoke on campus at UC Berkeley on October…