Longtime pro-Israel journalist Ira Stoll follows up a lot of “whispered speculation” to unearth NYT editorial page editor James Bennet’s religious background, as “crucial context” for understanding the paper’s bias on Israel. It turns out that Bennet’s Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust was married in a church, and he was too. And BTW, she likens Israelis to Nazis.

In a recent musical promotion video for the Eurovision, the Israeli Public Broadcaster Kan has applied cringeworthy vulgarity, drawing upon anti-Semitic tropes, misogyny and various forms of racism and ultra-nationalism, clearly making the Eurovision political, for those who believed it wasn’t.

The British government archives has refused to declassify a file about the activities of the Nazi-sympathizing Mufti of Jerusalem in 1941 in Iraq, in the time preceding British takeover of the country. Government censors told author Tom Suarez the contents of the 78-year-old file could aid “those determined to undermine the security of the country.”

Neoconservatives are pushing for war with Iran inside the Trump administration, and we can only thwart their plans by calling them out, as the rightwing Israel lobby, whose aims are not in the American people’s interests, however you define them, from human rights in the Middle East to avoiding another disastrous war.

Marc Ellis reviews Paul Mendes-Flohr’s new biography, Martin Buber: A life of Faith and Dissent: “My biggest complaint, a serious one, is that Buber’s understanding of the prophetic is mentioned but is hardly given the due needed. Buber’s analysis of the prophetic and its consistent failure, exemplified in his life both in Germany, Palestine and Israel, will, in my view, be, perhaps already is, Buber’s greatest contribution to the Jewish present and future.”

This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is taking place in Tel Aviv. The popular music event could be a great propaganda opportunity for Europe’s last colony. But government-funded Hasbara continues to recycle the same colonial myths, trying to conceal settler-colonial inscription and indigenous erasure behind colorful pictures of sun, sea, rainbow flags, and shawarma.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees announced on Monday its fears that some 1 million Palestinians in Gaza — half of the territory’s population — “may not have enough food” come June.

Michael Oren hangs up on the New Yorker and accuses it of “delegitimization” when reporter Isaac Chotiner asks why he has a right as a Jew born in New York to move to the occupied West Bank. The New Yorker inches closer to the awareness that today’s Zionism is settler-colonialism. 

The ethos of Zionism from its inception was to create a new kind of Jew, disconnected from the Jew’s former alleged diasporic weakness. Jonathan Ofir contends that this basic notion represents the weakness of Zionism, which Zionists need to relinquish in order to move Israeli society toward any kind of peaceful coexistence with Arabs.

The U.S. mainstream press and television networks are committing media malpractice and contributing to the rising risk of an American war with Iran.