Palestinian author Reja-e Busailah says he loves the United States although he has witnessed Islamophobia here for 60 years, going back to an ad on a NY radio station, “Give a dollar and kill an Arab.” At 89, retired in Indiana, he reflects on the Nakba that deprived him of his home, and on what terms he would return to the land of his birth. Spoiler alert: Equality.
Israeli hasbarists are exploiting the death of settler Ari Fuld for propaganda value as they admonish people for being insensitive, or even complicit, if they do not mourn. At the same time, it is forbidden to note that Palestinians are systematically being dehumanized to death by the very ideology that Ari Fuld was championing and is being openly remembered for.
Brandon Jetter chronicles the conservative movement’s evolution on Israel from viewing it as a “racist state” back in the 1950s and holding pro-Arab sentiments, to adopting a position where Israel is seen as a moral and strategic alley.
Washington’s decision to intensify swingeing aid cuts to the Palestinians – the latest targets include cancer patients and peace groups – reveals more than a simple determination to strong-arm the Palestinian leadership to the negotiating table.
David Lloyd says that the outrage that has greeted University of Michigan’s John Cheney-Lippold refusal to write a letter of reference for a student who wished to participate in a Study Abroad Program in Israel is astonishingly hypocritical. “No professor and no institution should engage in furthering programs that so systematically violate our long-cherished equal-opportunity and anti-discrimination policies, inscribed both in federal law and campus codes. US academics should do the right thing by following Professor Cheney-Lippold’s courageous example and refusing to participate in any institutional endorsement of study abroad in Israel,” Lloyd writes.
Breaking with decades of policy among Palestinian political factions and religious leaders in Jerusalem, Ramadan Dabash, 53, a Palestinian man from the Sur Baher village of occupied East Jerusalem, is putting his name on the ballot for the Jerusalem Municipality elections this October. His run in the elections have reignited a long-held debate in the community over Palestinian participation in the elections.
The Jews who led the heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 wanted one thing: vengeance for their families and friends who had been mercilessly slaughtered. They never got that satisfaction. That thirst for vengeance has been tragically displaced onto Palestinians.
Young Palestinians from the “Oslo generation” say that the compromises of the peace process were unfair ones. Oslo “normalized the occupation in every way,” says Yasmin Abu Shakdim, 22. While Meras al-Azza, 25, says, “They gave up all of our land against the will of the Palestinian people.”
Donna Nevel says she frequently hears the sentiment articulated in some progressive Jewish spaces that the left needs to be more concerned about anti-Semitism. But she wonders what exactly is being referred to, and why is anti-Semitism being singled out as a particular problem when other injustices aren’t? “I believe those of us within Jewish social justice spaces who are concerned about anti-Semitism on the left would benefit from deep reflection about what it is we are centering and why,” Nevel writes.
In an effort to legalize thousands of settler homes in West Bank, the Israeli government audaciously claims that it can “legislate anywhere in the world”, that it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries”, and that “is allowed to ignore the directives of international law in any field it desires”.