The U.S. has quietly frozen its aid to the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday, a provision of the Taylor Force Act passed earlier this year, according to the Israeli news reports.
Nickolay Mladenov, the UN coordinator for the Middle East peace process, was briefly a moral leader against Israeli violence. “Stop shooting children,” he tweeted. But in a recapitulation of the Goldstone farce, Norman Finkelstein relates, Mladenov has now collapsed under pressure, and turned on Palestinian incitement and provocation as matters for condemnation.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez toppled Joseph Crowley, the fourth highest Democrat in the House, in the Democratic primary in NY yesterday. She has called on Dems to support Palestinian dignity, tweeting in May of Gaza shootings: “This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such… Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.”
On June 8, when some 250,000 people attended the pride march in Tel Aviv, just some 44 miles away Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip faced Israeli snipers. For LGBTQ Palestinians, Tel Aviv’s pride week is a source of pain and anger each year. Pride is “used as a tool to normalize and justify occupation,” 20-year-old Omar told Mondoweiss. “Israelis oppress Palestinians, Palestinian women, Palestinian children, LGBT Palestinians. Anyone who is not Israeli Jewish, they oppress.”
The Gay Liberation Network’s “We Stand With Palestine” contingent in the Chicago Gay Pride Parade – with its huge 160 sq foot banner, “Israel: STOP killing Palestinians!” – was met with almost universal approval by the approximately 1 million people who lined the four-mile parade route.
Isaac Herzog, the chair of the Jewish Agency and former leader of the Zionist left…
Nick Muzin, a leading pro-Israel operative in D.C., says that Al Jazeera has “canned” its undercover investigation of the Israel lobby, completed last year, because of the intervention of Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America.
Jonathan Cook says the flaming kites being flown by protesters in Gaza are driven by a mix of recognisably human emotions: a refusal to bow before crushing oppression and a compelling need to take back control of one’s life.
“To tear down a school is possibly worse even than breaking a home into pieces and burying the pieces in the sand,” David Shulman writes on a visit to Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin village slated for demolition by the Israeli government, in a post for Margaret Olin’s site, Touching Photographs.
Hanan Abubasheer describes the trauma of life in Gaza: “For instance, you are returning happily from close friends’ wedding and you suddenly hear loud noise. if you are Gazan you don’t think of the possibility that there may be children playing or fireworks going off somewhere, you think: oh, the war is back.”