Jeffrey Goldberg, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Bret Stephens and the other American Bibi-ists went from All Netanyahu all the time to No Netanyahu ever, Yakov Hirsch explains. Because they can’t be leading the moral charge against Trump’s “evil plan to crush the press,” while offering obfuscation about Netanyahu’s actual evil plan to crush the press, as they once did, when they were empowering the now-run-amok prime minister.
The fight to block the criminalization of BDS should go beyond the focus on making it a matter of American freedom of expression, and American citizens’ constitutional rights, Nada Elia writes. It is a matter of solidarity with an oppressed people, suffering under brutal occupation, a genocidal siege, and apartheid.
Shoshana, an American in Palestine, visits Jaffa and finds that it’s different from the movies, “I don’t like Jaffa. In my all-consuming Palestine obsession, I find it frustratingly Israeli. I hear so much Arabic but see no Palestinian flags. It feels generalized and deracinated.”
The World Food Programme has announced severe reductions and suspensions in aid for Palestinian beneficiaries in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip, due to funding shortages brought on by major US aid cuts over the past year.
Nai Barghouti shares a story of being racially profiled and harassed at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport: “As furious as I am at the Israeli security officer’s ugly racism and vengefulness, I felt slightly bad for her. Despite her best efforts to humiliate me, I shall go on resisting her state’s racism and apartheid with my music. She, however, will continue to search Palestinians’ underwear and be an insignificant tool of a system of racist oppression.”
Marc Ellis writes that the rescinding by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute of an award to Angela Davis raises issues about the Black-Jewish alliance and the ability of Jews to set parameters for African Americans to speak on Jewish questions, including Israel. There is a war over that question. The Jewish establishment sees Angela Davis as an enemy. Jews of Conscience see her as an ally.
Zionism was founded on the Romantic nationalist idea that Jews really are a people apart from other peoples and that’s why we deserve a homeland, Joseph Levine writes; and liberal Jews who rejected the idea worried that Zionists would undermine their status in western countries. So dual loyalty was an issue long before US Rep. Rashida Tlaib was accused by Marco Rubio of raising an anti-Semitic “canard.”
“I wouldn’t have just moved the embassy to Jerusalem and not asked for something in return from Netanyahu or, or the Palestinians,” Tom Friedman says on CNN. Really? The embassy move was a kick in the gut to Palestinians, and the gaffe just reveals the reflexive need of a mainstream pundit to blame Palestinians for the conflict, even when they are blameless.
The Birmingham Holocaust Education Center has trampled on the credo, Never Again, by objecting to Angela Davis’s humanitarian award because she supports Palestinian rights. Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh calls on the Education Center to apologize for the damage it has done to Palestinian human rights.
A study of 100,000 headlines in the five leading US newspapers in the last 50 years shows that mentions of Palestinian refugees have declined by 93%, Israeli sources are nearly 250% more likely to be quoted as Palestinians; and the number of headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestine. Edward Said was right, Palestinians lack the permission to narrate.