While Israeli and some Western media label Gaza Palestinians’ ongoing, six-week protest a “riot,” what visitors and participants see on the ground is completely different. The protests have become a theater for family-oriented cultural celebrations honoring the right of refugees to return to their lands. You encounter women cooking Bedouin bread, young men dancing dabka and children flying kites.
The George Washington University student Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution to divest from nine companies known to be complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights after being delayed a week because of threats to their safety by the anti-BDS group Canary Mission. Still, Canary Mission showed up on campus the night of the Senate vote, and it got very bizarre.
What happens when you call Israeli soldiers who kill unarmed protesters ‘terrorists’? Adi Shosberger did it and she has been ostracized by Israeli society, condemned by the prime minister, and subject to death threats.
I’m sure you’re aware of the many ways Israel and its supporters have worked to…
A second Palestinian journalist has died after being shot by Israeli forces while covering the Gaza protests. Ahmad abu Hussein, 24, succumbed yesterday in an Israeli hospital, 12 days after he was shot in the stomach while wearing a Press flak jacket on April 13. By one report, Abu Hussein was shot by an expanding bullet, from hundreds of meters away. International journalists are expressing outrage.
Israel is alienating liberal Zionist support by killing unarmed protesters, by its more overt annexation of the West Bank, by its domestic racism, and its gleeful embrace of Donald Trump. Marilyn Garson says that Netanyahu is ripping open a space of liberal doubt and a campaign for Palestinian rights can fill that vacancy.
Palestinian Christian Advocates for Justice and the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace: “The Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, as well as the rest of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights, is now in its fifty-first year, the longest military occupation since the end of the nineteenth century. Palestinian Christians and Muslims are calling on the church to use its influence to end the occupation.”
The Israeli border police officer who shot and killed Palestinian teenager Nadim Nuwara in 2014 was sentenced on Wednesday by an Israeli court to nine months in prison and a $13,940 (50,000 NIS) fine for negligent homicide. Nuwara’s father Saim said the sentence “does not even come close to justice.”
Just when Emmanuel Macron arrives in Washington to try and save the Iran deal, another county heard from! Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s defense minister, and commander of the Gaza snipers, flew to the U.S. to meet with John Bolton, the national security adviser and ardent supporter of Israel, to counter the European push for peace with Iran.
Natalie Portman’s decision to boycott an awards ceremony in Israel is putting pressure on other liberal Zionists to take real action to try and end the occupation, and scaring other liberal Zionists who fear that she is fostering the BDS campaign.