The civil rights organization Dream Defenders, along with leading entertainers and civil rights icons including Danny Glover, Rosario Dawson, and Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams, issue a statement in support of Ahed Tamimi: “The Tamimi family stands up to Israel’s brutality because they believe Palestinians, like ALL  people, should be free. Dream Defenders stands with them and all Palestinians in their righteous struggle. Now, and always, we commit to building a more just and loving world for us all.”

Amos Schocken, publisher of Haaretz, bashes US ambassador David Friedman for perpetuating “apartheid” in the West Bank, and meantime former Israeli security official Charles Freilich says that Jewish “intermarriage” in the U.S. is threatening Israel’s support because assimilating Jews don’t see the “supreme ideological importance” of the settlements as an “existential” issue for Israel.

Many Israelis and others believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting regional armed conflict, air war over Syria, to distract attention from corruption probes that are zeroing in on him and his wife, Sara. But a NY Times report leaves this angle out completely.

In their manhunt for the Palestinian teen suspected of stabbing and killing an Israeli settler on Monday, Israeli forces raided Nablus on Wednesday and injured 110 Palestinians, including one man run over by a Jeep. A Palestinian youth, Khaled Walid Tayeh, 22, was killed, one of three Palestinians killed this week by Israeli forces.

Nathan Englander is a superb storyteller in his new novel Dinner at the Center of the Earth. And the spiritual portrait of the Israelis is grim. It’s not a happy country. Everyone is narcotized or unconscious or belligerent. The book’s central character is a young American who was deluded by his beautiful Hebrew school teacher to believe that Israel was his birthright, and so he made aliyah, and became a black-ops warrior, only to find that Israel was committing indiscriminate massacres.

The nomination of Kenneth Marcus, President Trump’s choice for the position of Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, will go to a vote next week, and he is expected to be shooed in, on a straight party line vote. If he is confirmed, he will likely become the latest member of a growing list of politicians threatening academic freedom generally, as well our civil rights as women, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Nada Elia writes, “As more faculty, and students, come under attack, it is imperative that we grow our support networks, and that we make it clear we are many, and will not be intimidated.”  

Rabbi Susan Silverman describes Israel as a place of refuge in a NYT piece denouncing plans to deport thousands of African refugees. But the piece never mentions Palestinian refugees. “We are the people who expelled over three quarters of a million people in our war of conquest in 1948,” Joseph Levine writes.

As most of you by now know, Facebook has recently made big changes to how users see content from publishers like Mondoweiss. The changes are expected to dramatically lower the “reach” our material enjoys, but here are some easy steps you can take to ensure that you’ll continue to see our most important stories.

When rightwing Israeli ambassador Dani Dayan went to Columbia Univ on February 5, a protest coalition of Students for Justice in Palestine of Columbia and Columbia/Barnard’s Jewish Voice for Peace responded with a mock checkpoint and non-disruptive protest aimed at informing fellow students about Israel’s illegal settlement project, which Dayan, a settler, represents.

In July 2004, federal agents raided the homes of five Palestinian-American families, arresting the fathers, who had been leaders of a Texas-based charity called the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). Until 9/11, the HLF was the largest Muslim charity in the United States, but their trials resulted in very lengthy sentences for the men—for “supporting terrorism” by donating to charities in Palestine that the U.S. government itself had long worked with. The men remain in prison. Miko Peled’s new book “Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five” tells the story of the landmark case and the families it impacted. In this excerpt he tells the story of Shukri Abu-Baker.