Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement write a letter to the University of California’s Task Force on University wide policing drawing the linkages between divestment from Israeli colonization/occupation and the need to remove the presence of police and policing from UC campuses: “Students recognize that these patterns and structures of oppression are deeply interlinked, often enabling and sustaining one another, and that the call for prison and police abolition, even in local spaces/contexts, is consistent with the imperative to support Palestinian freedom and liberation.”

When activists learned that the Northampton, MA, police chief had accepted an invitation from the Anti-Defamation League to train with Israeli “counter-terrorism” experts, they mobilized and the chief decided not to go. The ADL is seeking to enforce a highly-politicized mission of supporting Israel on law enforcement agencies that are supposed to be above partisanship. More and more police forces in the Northeast are declining to go.

The Hanukkah story is also a religious-political one from its beginnings – and it still is. It poses the question of how we view religious fundamentalism and separation of church and state. We need no more proof than Sheldon Adelson’s aptly named Campus Maccabees crusading against the BDS movement by way of free trips to Israel.

Rashida Tlaib likens the Israeli occupation to the Jim Crow south. Both Jimmy Carter and Condoleezza Rice made the same analogy, to the south of their youths, and both suffered politically for it.

Israel, along with the rest of the world, commemorated International Day of Persons with Disabilities on Monday, December 3rd, by promising greater integration of the country’s 1.5 million disabled citizens. As Monday’s activities came to a close, just across the Green Line in the northern occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem, Israeli forces shot and killed a disabled Palestinian man in the back of his head.

CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill was fired last week after he advocated Palestinian rights “from the river to the sea”. Of course that has been Israeli policy from the days of Ben-Gurion, in defiance of the indigenous population, and no one advocating Israeli sovereignty in those boundaries ever loses their job, Jonathan Ofir explains.

Pro-Palestine and free speech activists who have been mobilizing against the Israel Anti-Boycott Act are sounding an alarm about rumors of a secret attempt this week to slip the legislation, which the ACLU has declared unconstitutional even in its revised form, into the must-pass House spending bill before the blue wave comes into power.

Can leftist Jews really be part of the struggle for justice for Palestinians—a justice that hinges on an end to the violation of basic human rights, including the Right of Return of refugees—by making Aliyah to the country that privileges them, simply because they are Jewish?  

“Changes in Israeli society are rendering the Liberal Zionist program impracticable and irrelevant,” Daniel Solomon writes in 972. They are destined for the dustbin of history along with the Whig Party! And it’s time for liberal Zionists to choose liberalism over Zionism. That’s why Solomon declares himself a “non-Zionist.”

Robert Herbst responds to CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill: “Hill’s provocative call for freedom for Palestinians in the whole of historic Palestine (or Greater Israel), in a single state guaranteeing rights for both peoples, did not mention Jews or Israelis, leaving him vulnerable to the false attack that he was advocating eliminating Jews from the Holy Land.”