Hammam Farah says Palestinians in Canada are witnessing an attempt to redefine their identity away from a collective political emancipation to one where national symbols like the kuffiyeh or the olive tree are denuded of their meaning. “We are left with a culture that is being depoliticized and being ‘made safe’ for our elites’ integration into Canada’s ruling classes at an alarming rate,” Farah writes, “while exploitation and oppression suffered by the majority among us only deepen.”

Liberal Zionists have set out rules for how to criticize the Israel lobby without offending them. They are trying to obscure a 70 year pattern of Zionists influencing U.S. policy, from the recognition of Israel’s establishment by Truman, who depended on Zionist donors, to Trump trashing the Iran deal in deference to Sheldon Adelson.

In what may signal a major break in longstanding US policy, the State Department referred to the occupied Syrian Golan Heights as “Israeli-controlled,” as opposed to the usual “Israeli-occupied,” for the first time in their 2018 human rights report published Wednesday. In the report, the State Department also failed to refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as occupied territories.

The recent declaration of anti-Zionism by Jewish Voice for Peace has the compassion necessary to reach liberal Zionists– and thus to break the consensus within the Jewish community. And because Jews are still the gatekeepers of the American discussion of Israel, the statement could ultimately move U.S. policy toward equality.

Jonathan Ofir says Israel uses a unique construct of citizenship and nationality to confuse and even downright deceive the international community – indeed even its own citizens. Here he unpacks what each term means, and what the implications are for Palestinians living under Israeli control.

Misrepresentations of the Arab world, especially Palestine, in school textbooks is a widespread problem that has contributed to anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and fear of “the other.” Aline Batarseh is working to change that in Virginia.

Forty-seven years after 14 Irish protesters were killed on Bloody Sunday 1972, a British soldier faces charges in two deaths. The dead were unarmed protesters who were a threat to riot in British eyes. Very much like the thousands of unarmed Palestinians shot at the Gaza fence in the last year, shootings the UN and B’Tselem says are war crimes.

Following Israel’s expulsion of the TIPH observer group from Hebron last month, a group of Palestinian activists from the city formed their own team of observers to fill in the gaps. Mondoweiss followed the team around one morning, and in the span of half an hour, the group, including our cameraman, were attacked and harassed by Israeli settlers, while one international activist who was filming the altercation was arrested by police.

Ahmed Abdelmageed asks, “If I, as a Palestinian, am not allowed to speak of Israel’s occupation and subsequent ethnic cleansing of my land in June 1948; and if I, as a Palestinian-American, am to watch my U.S. government unabashedly support my occupier militarily, politically and financially; and if I, as a Palestinian-American, am not to have the right to condemn, criticize or boycott my occupier; then what am I to do?”

The Gaza protests will mark their one-year anniversary in 2 weeks, with real political potential for the Palestinian struggle. Gaza has always been a crucible for political movements in part because its population has such a high percentage of refugees of the Nakba in 1948. Helena Cobban traces the history.