Ilhan Omar was right to point out the impact of AIPAC’s money. AIPAC is seeking now to silence criticism of the inhumane occupation by screaming about anti-semitism and claiming that nobody may ever talk about how the Israel lobby uses money — Activist Ady Barkan relates a story from the campaign trail.

For weeks under the cloak of night Palestinians secretly renovated four caves and built a tin-roofed house in secret in the West Bank hamlet of Ar-Rakeez where only a handful of residents live. Because of rigid Israeli planning restrictions and frequent settler harassment, most of the Ar-Rakeez’s villagers moved to the nearby city of Yatta over the last 20 years. Yet in recent years locals have developed a strategy to repopulate the abandoned village by renovating caves, a legal loophole that circumvents Israeli policies of demolishing homes constructed or upgraded without a permit. Last week they opened the homes in a “bringing life back” ceremony.

Once again, Likud Party in Israel applies anti-Palestinian race-baiting campaigns in favor of Netanyahu, framing the rival Benny Gantz as enabling a treason. But both sides compete on the “Israel-first” notion.

Only democracy in the Middle East? Eleven villages, which are home to some 40,000 Palestinian Bedouins who have Israeli citizenship, currently have no polling stations or public transportation to reach existing stations for the upcoming Israeli elections.

See what it is like to take a trip down the new four-lane highway West Bank locals and activists have dubbed the ‘Apartheid Road’. It features two separate roads divided by a concrete wall – one for Israeli settlers and the other for Palestinians. Despite Israeli claims that the road “eases traffic congestion” for both Palestinians and Israelis, locals maintain that it is just another step by authorities to further divide the occupied Palestinian territory.

Does AIPAC use money to influence Congress, as Ilhan Omar said. Of course it does! Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List said that before congressional candidates even have a campaign manager or a policy director, they go to AIPAC to get a position paper on Israel “because this is how we raise money” from the “Jewish community.”

The latest pro-Israel article in the ‘NY Times’ is a bizarre effort to slander Palestinian rights by making false connections to Al-Qaeda and Africa. The insinuation was clear: Palestinians and those who support them are on the same side as the evil men who killed 3000 Americans at the World Trade Center.  

Bret Stephens’s long opinion piece in the New York Times equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a boon to the anti-Zionist movement. His claims that it is anti-Semitic to see “wickedness” in unending occupation and that all American Jews are Zionists are debating points he will only lose. The piece makes anti-Zionism a topic for every dinner table and turns BDS into a household word.

Palestinian teen boys Hasan Shalabi, 14, and Hamza Shteiwi, 18, were the latest victims of lethal Israeli gunfire during the weekly protest Friday, the 46th week of the Great Return March. Seventeen others were wounded by live fire, including four medics and two journalists.

The “Humboldt 3” are three BDS activists who face a criminal trial in Berlin next month for disrupting a pro-Israel event by an Israeli lawmaker at a university in 2017. Israel has silenced Germany on Palestinian rights using Holocaust guilt, but in Copenhagen the three activists received an award for their courage in exposing apartheid.