There are few places in Israel where its apartheid character is more conspicuous than the imposing international airport just outside Tel Aviv, named after the country’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. Jonathan Cook writes that Peter Beinart’s interrogation at Ben Gurion airport was just the opening salvo in the Israeli right’s war against Jewish dissent: “It is a slope liberal Jews will find gets ever more slippery.”
The current hysteria engulfing the British Labour Party is based on the premises that anti-Semitism in British society at large and the Labour Party in particular has reached crisis proportions. There is no evidence for either claim, Norman Finkelstein shows.
Brian Lehrer’s legitimate question about pedophilia scandals, Why are you still a Catholic? could be asked about being Jewish in an era of Israeli massacres and being in the foreign policy establishment despite support for the Iraq war blunder. Oh but those questions are a little too close to home.
Al Jazeera reports that Israel has closed an investigation into an assault on August 1, 2014, in which 135 Palestinians were killed in southern Gaza: “In a report on Wednesday, the Israeli army cleared itself of wrongdoing and said it would not prosecute commanders who were involved, claiming its investigation found no reason to suspect criminal misconduct.”
Nestled in the hilltops of the occupied West Bank, an ancient Palestinian Christian village is gearing up for a fight against the Israeli occupation. “My family has owned hundreds of dunums of land in Aboud for centuries. Our roots date so far back, I cannot even count,” seventy-year-old Abdullah Sharqawi tells Mondoweiss. “For now maybe they will let me access the land. But inevitably, with time, they will tell me no, it is not allowed,” he says.
Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the original founders and organizers of the Great Return March, writes: “The idea of One State is aligned with the spirit of our time. The global consciousness has evolved away from the idea of nationalism toward one of citizenship. Millions of Arabs today are citizens in Europe and America who enjoy the same rights as all other citizens of those countries. Why can’t Jews live in Palestine in exactly the same way – on the basis of citizenship and not of Occupation?”
Jonathan Ofir writes that Reza Aslan’s decision to speak out about the abuse he received trying to enter Israel after Peter Beinart made his story public reminds him of the momentum and grass roots power of the MeToo movement: “There is this element of a critical mass, where people actually start to listen. It’s no longer a lone voice here, a single story there – it becomes a movement.”
Anyone deluded enough to believe that Israel truly wants democracy to spread in the Middle East must read David D. Kirkpatrick’s outstanding first-hand account of the 2011 uprising in Egypt and its ugly aftermath, “Hands of Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East.”
Nathan Thrall’s long read in the Guardian on the origins of the BDS movement: “The nonviolent activism of the second intifada was a prelude to what would become a worldwide boycott campaign.”
There is no way for anyone in Israel to marry in a civil service. Judges and mayors do not have the power to marry you. You need your local rabbi, priest or qadi. If you want to intermarry, you have to fly to a foreign country and then hope that Israel will recognize the marriage. That’s why there’s a cottage marriage industry in nearby Cyprus. A guide to the perplexed, by Yossi Gurvitz.