Seemingly unrelated events all point to a tectonic shift in which Israel has begun preparing the ground to annex the occupied Palestinian territories.
Anna Baltzer of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights was raised to regard neutrality in a conflict as a virtue– till she went to Palestine, and saw the grotesque imbalance of power and brutal occupation. She describes her path to activism at TEDxOcala.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech was about ‘the good, the bad and the beautiful’. All about equality and justice – but not for Palestinians.
The Senate is about to consider President Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus. He is unfit for the job, given his extensive history of targeting constitutionally protected speech, of hostility towards affirmative action and civil rights, of anti-LGBTQ positions, and of lobbying for discrimination in university funding based on political viewpoints.
In a sign of growing establishment distrust of the Israel lobby group AIPAC, several writers liken it to the NRA, and the Washington Post publishes an important article by Doug Rossinow saying that the lobby originated in American Jews rallying to promote Israeli “lies” about “awful knowledge”: the massacre of more than 60 Palestinians in Qibya in the West Bank in 1953.
Video captured on Monday by Ma’an News shows Israeli forces assaulting Palestinian medics as they were attempting to aid a Palestinian who had been shot during clashes in the area. The four paramedics were beaten, pushed and allegedly threatened by soldiers of being shot and pepper-sprayed before Israeli soldiers opened live fire were in the air above their heads. Despite being beaten and pushed around, video of the assault shows the medics repeatedly attempting to rescue injured youth from Israeli troops.
Pro-Israel activism gave journalist Bari Weiss quite a career. As a youth she bagged one Zionist fellowship after another, leading to opinion editing at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in her early 30s. Which is no surprise, given the Times’s employment of several pro-Israel columnists.
Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem continues to resonate. One response is a new video of a Mahmoud Darwish poem as read by Roger Waters, with orchestration by Le Trio Joubran, a band of three Palestinian brothers, two of whom play oud. The piece is titled “Supremacy.”
Yesterday, students, campus workers, and allies from across the University of California system were in Los Angeles to call on the UC Regents to listen to student voices and divest university funds from corporations that profit from human rights abuses against the Palestinian people.
The nomination of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State means that Donald Trump has adopted an interventionist foreign policy and may kill the Iran deal. Neoconservatives are exulting. While Joe Cirincione of Ploughshares, who pushed the deal, says, “It’s almost as if someone is paying Trump to do it.” That would be Trump’s biggest backer, Sheldon Adelson, who also got the embassy.