On Wednesday, July 11th, a group human rights defenders disrupted a Jewish National Fund event at St. Louis University Law School. The event was titled “Israel’s Borders in International Law” and featured an Israeli lawyer, Eugene Kontorovich, a settler who lives in an Israeli colony near Bethlehem. Mina Aria writes, “In staging this disruption we sent a clear message that the Jewish National Fund and supporters of ethnic cleansing and colonization are not welcome in St Louis.”
“Israel is effectively declaring itself an apartheid state and dropping its worn-out mask of democracy,” Omar Barghouti says. And now that it is constitutionally mandated “to racially discriminate against” Palestinian citizens, “this should stir people, institutions and governments to take effective action to hold Israel accountable.”
Akram Al-Wa’ra, Mondoweiss correspondent, writes: “I have witnessed many atrocities in my life here in Palestine. I have seen my friends shot and killed during protests and my family members arrested and thrown in jail. But nothing prepared me for what I witnessed in the footage from Gaza. If it wasn’t for organizations like Mondoweiss, many of these images would never be seen by the international community. My people need Mondoweiss to thrive and grow—please help now.”
“Netanyahu’s regime is digging a deep pit of fear, racism, and authoritarianism to divide us from each other. But they can never erase us from the homeland we share,” Ayman Odeh of the Palestinian Joint List said in anger after Israeli parliament passed a law declaring Israel the nation state of the Jewish people.
Trump and Putin’s efforts to praise Israel and validate its interests at their Helsinki press conference caused CNN to break a taboo in its coverage, and say Trump had Israel’s interests not American ones “on his mind.” No country has ever been closer to America than Israel, Trump says.
Critics of the Israel’s occupation can now be banned from giving presentations to school children, according to a law passed Monday night by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. A spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said he plans on ignoring the law.
Earlier this week Israeli forces shut down the Hind Al-Husseini College, a campus for al-Quds University located in East Jerusalem near the Old City– “until further notice.”
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism equates antisemitism with advocacy for Palestinian rights and undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom and the global struggle against antisemitism, say 39 Jewish groups around the world that do not oppose BDS.
Richard Falk: “Seeking to criminalize support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and deny entry to Israel of its active supporters is a step that even racist South Africa never took in opposing a similar transnationally organized solidarity movement.” An interview about the BDS movement, launched 13 years ago.
When the US was exposed interfering in the Ukrainian election in 2014, Obama aide Ben Rhodes expressed rage at the Russians for disclosing that face, in a violation of major power etiquette. His hypocrisy is typical. The US has intervened in 81 foreign elections since 1946, Russian or the Soviet Union only 36 times, per a leading study.