Israel’s most powerful weapon is the smearing of its critics as anti-Semites. After the Jewish Chronicle in London smeared Tom Suarez, the author filed a formal complaint against the newspaper with Britain’s main media watchdog, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), and won a partial victory.
Jonathan Cook writes that while there are signs politicians in the U.S. are finally ready to shine a light onto the pro-Israel lobby, the opposite is taking place in United Kingdom. He says this is due to the way the Israel lobby has recently emerged in British politics – hurriedly, and in a mix of panic and damage limitation mode due to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and the end of the international two-state consensus.
Five brothers in the Abu Jazar family in Gaza have suffered serious injuries in the year since the March of Return protests began. Their father Mohammed Abu Jazar says he has no power to stop his sons from demonstrating. “They are natural protesters against injustice.”
Gerard Araud, the outgoing French ambassador to the US, says Jared Kushner has “no guts” and his peace plan is “very close” to what Israel wants. “He is so pro-Israeli he may neglect the point that if you offer the Palestinians the choice between surrendering and committing suicide, they may decide the latter.”
A Palestinian teacher, Fatima Suleiman, 42, was killed Thursday morning near her home in the occupied West Bank, after being rammed by the car of an illegal colonialist settler. The soldiers later shot and seriously injured a Palestinian teen while handcuffed, when he reportedly attempted to run from the scene.
In the latest blow dealt by the American government to the Palestinians, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was responsible for millions of dollars of aid projects in the occupied Palestinian territory, will be laying off some 85% of its local staff in the coming weeks. There has been speculation that the Trump administration ordered the job cuts as part of the lead up to unveiling its peace plan, which is set to be released in the coming months.
American liberal Zionists and rightwing Zionists wrote opposing letters to Trump this week over Netanyahu’s plans to annex West Bank settlements. The open squabbling is a result of Trump’s extreme support for Israel and also the 52-year-long occupation, which has at last brought a crisis to the Jewish establishment’s consensus, that to be Jewish means to support Israel.
A plan for an alternative Passover seder which is a reaction to the Israeli occupation and the Jewish religious rites deployed in its support: Ira Glunts’s Seder lo b’seder: the seder that skips the traditional seder, and supports BDS.
The Mueller Report was released today, and one section reveals that “multiple members” of the Trump transition team, led by Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, sought to undermine the Obama White House’s decision to allow the passage of a UN Security Council resolution in December 2016 that was sharply critical of Israeli settlements.
One month after recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, the Trump administration released on Tuesday the first official US government map depicting the occupied Syrian territory as part of Israel. With talks of partial of even full Israeli annexation of the West Bank seemingly on the table, the map could signal an impending US decision regarding the status of the settlements in the territory, and as a result, what a future Palestinian state might look like under Trump’s vision.