Palestine was not empty. The Jewish people are not a nation with a homeland in the Middle East. Palestine was not ‘redeemed’, it was colonized. Its people did not flee, they were ethnically cleansed. Jews are not all Zionists. These are some of the myths that scholar Ilan Pappe exposes in his new book.

Relaying an unusually pessimistic outlook on Middle East peace, a senior White House official said today the Trump administration and the Palestinian leadership have not spoken in nearly seven weeks, breaking contact after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Liberal Democrats have turned against Israel. Nearly twice as many liberal Democrats say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel– 35% vs. 19%– in the latest Pew survey. Just two years ago, Israel’s number was 33. We can thank Netanyahu’s ugly international image for that, as well as the attitudes of the young.

When Issa Amro was a child, he remembers Shuhada Street in Hebron being so crowded his father had to hold his hand tightly to keep him from getting lost. Today, the street is a ghost town, due to Israeli military control to protect illegal settlers. And Amro calls for international protests for the 9th annual Open Shuhada Street day on February 25, to demand an end to apartheid

Kadima, the Seattle Reconstructionist Jewish community, gave an award to a grassroots immigrants’ rights group, the Northwest Detention Center Resistance/Resistencia al NWDC, which focuses on a federal detention center in Tacoma, after the Jewish Federations of Seattle chose to honor the police department, despite its record of excessive force.

The Israeli military spying unit 8200 came to public attention in 2014 when reserve soldiers refused to serve as “tools for the deepening of the military regime in the occupied territories.” Now, facing a shortage of soldiers the unit will be seeking to get its recruits from the 10th grade.

Israeli officials in the Population and Immigration authority have begun distributing an ‘information page’ for African refugees at the Holot desert detention center. The document is chilling. It does not name the third country the refugees would be deported to, but ends with a warning that “if you do not agree to leave voluntarily to a third country, enforcement and deportation steps will be taken against you.” Not mentioned in the document is the new rule that refusal to leave will entail indefinite incarceration. The document ends with a “best of luck” wish.

Ben Jealous, the former President and CEO of the NAACP, is running for governor of Maryland. Kim Jensen and Laila El-Haddad are encouraged by his stances on public education, worker’s rights, and single-payer healthcare but say his position on BDS reveals a troubling inconsistency in his platform as a progressive.

Gaza is effectively an open-air prison, an extremely overcrowded one, with only a few hours of electricity a day and its groundwater polluted by seawater and sewage. After a decade of this horrifying experiment in human endurance, the Israeli army finally appears to be concerned about whether Gaza can cope much longer.

As Vice President Mike Pence began his speech to the Israeli Knesset, Palestinian lawmakers disrupted the speech, protesting the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. They were forcibly removed from the chamber– reportedly all 13 members of the Joint List. In his fiery speech, Pence advocated regime change in Iran.