Steven Salaita on why Zionists should be excluded from left-wing protests: “The most important reason why ‘no Zionists’ is justified has less to do with strategy than with comradely spirit: is the US left finally willing to respect Palestinian (and more broadly Arab) sensibilities? Or will it continue to demand that Palestinians defer their liberation in order to assuage Zionist fragility?”
Granted an op-ed in the New York Times to spread distortions and lies regarding Israel’s critics, the country’s Education Minister Naftali Bennett attempts to whitewash the recent Israeli ban against BDS activist groups, by demonizing them as “enemy soldiers” and slyly comparing them to those who “helped Nazi Germany.”
Israeli poet Yehonatan Geffen caused a furor in Israel for his comparison of Ahed Tamimi to Anne Frank, but he has now recanted his offending comparison. This followed incitement by Israeli government ministers creating what he calls “effective house arrest” for the past week. Not so bad compared to Ahed Tamimi’s detention or Dareen Tatour’s house arrest.
Nada Elia writes about the efforts to challenge the pinkwashing agenda of the National LGBTQ Task Force, organizer of the Creating Change conference: “From the Women’s March to Creating Change, we need to persist in our demands for equal rights for all. As the global discussion of misogyny and gender violence continues to build up, denouncing their pervasiveness in all aspects of life, we must insist on a discussion of Israel’s intrinsic violation of the human rights of Palestinians, in the name of ‘Jewish democracy.’ Creating Change must do better. #Time’sUp to toss Zionism where it belongs, in supremacist communities.”
The New York Times runs a long investigative piece by Ronen Bergman praising Israeli generals for not risking the lives of civilians in their efforts to target Arafat for assassination in the ’80s. The article glances over the hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel in bombing any building it suspected Arafat of hiding out in, war crimes you will not read about in the Times.
The Campus Antifascist Network calls for an end to the serial and libelous harassment of Stanford University Professor David Palumbo-Liu perpetrated by Fox News, the Stanford Review, and the alt-right.
Henry Siegman’s landmark piece in the National applauds Trump for ending illusions. The two-state solution is dead and buried, Palestinians are making the right choice, a struggle for equal rights. And this will lead to a “significant exodus of Jews” as Israel faces a future as an acknowledged apartheid state or a democracy. Siegman’s defection from Establishment “scam” on these issues shows up Barack Obama, who endorses the same old illusions in NY synagogue appearance.
Israeli democracy performs its excited dance around the Ahed Tamimi case. A poet is slammed for comparing her to Anne Frank. Commentators call the judge’s ruling “hysterical.” But nothing changes at the heart of the case: a 16-year-old is in prison indefinitely for slapping an occupying soldier.
Rockers Nick Cave and Thom Yorke were both contemptuous of the BDS movement last year. But the indefinite imprisonment of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi for slapping a soldier, which highlights the detention of more than 600 Palestinian children every year, ought to convince these free artists where their real sympathies should lie, with caged young people who have no hope of realizing their dreams, Frank Barat writes.
Michael Oren has made himself a laughingstock by starting an investigation into whether the Tamimi family of Nabi Saleh is “a real family”, because they wear baseball caps backward. The more important question is whether Israel is a real country; and it gets harder and harder to believe that it is.