As the Trump administration moves dangerously toward war with Iran, U.S. mainstream media ignores a major reason: Israel wants America to attack.
Israelis are the innocents, while Gaza militants are “terrorists” in countless statements about the weekend’s violence from U.S. Democrats and liberal Zionist groups. That makes Bernie Sanders’s call for an “evenhanded” policy and concern about human rights violations in Gaza remarkable for political courage. Sanders says he has been “criticized over and over again” for his stance.
Nada Elia writes: “Throughout the history of this country, progressive change has come from the grassroots, against the reactionary few. Now, as at other critical historical junctures, we need to make it clear to those coming under attack for their political and moral integrity that we will mobilize for them. As hate is emboldened, we need to send an unambiguous message: we are still the majority, they are the fringe.”
From March 30 until April 8, Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held its eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week and engaged more than 250 people in lectures, discussions, and performances on Palestinian struggle and resistance, the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime in Palestine, and the campaign to end military and police exchange between the United States and Israel.
On the morning of Friday, May 3, Israeli forces suppressed a joint action organized by Palestinian, Israeli and International Jewish activists to rehabilitate historical roads that are used by Palestinian communities in South Hebron Hills in the West Bank. Around 17 were arrested, including two photojournalists, who were interrogated in Kiryat Arba police station before getting released after 8 hours of detention.
One of the worst flare ups in violence across the Israeli-Gaza borders continued to escalate on Sunday, as Israeli air forces pounded more than 300 sites in the Gaza Strip, while Hamas forces in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory.As of Sunday afternoon, reports from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza indicated that 25 Palestinians, including a four-month and 14-month-old girl, two pregnant women, and a 12-year-old boy were killed in the strikes.
Grey smoke and fire plumes erupted for the second day in Gaza and nearby Israeli communities after a cross-fire of deadly rocket strikes launched by both Israeli military and Gaza militants. The death toll rose to 21 in Gaza and four in Israel.
Marc Ellis was to lecture students in Gaza by Skype but Israeli bombing caused a postponement– a first for the veteran scholar, who writes, “You are witnessing the end of ethical Jewish history.”
The New York Times asserts that Gaza forces initiated the latest violence, and Israelis merely responded, leaving out earlier Israeli strikes. The Times characteristically leaves the reader with the impression that Hamas is simply a bloodthirsty, terrorist movement that attacks at every opportunity without provocation.
Jonathan Ofir at a family seder in Israel, hearing the old stories of genocide: “You don’t want to throw away everything because some of it is rotten, you don’t want to make a family gathering political, but it’s hard to be part of it and reduce it to mere ‘tradition’. You’re wondering what you are enabling, indirectly, by not speaking out, or by saying too little, or by not opposing things more clearly.”