“Tourism is one of a range of tools that has been used by the Israeli government as a basis to grab land, and to expand their control in ways that abuse the rights of Palestinians,” Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir told The New Arab.
Queer activists in London released a spoof version of YMCA to urge BBC host Graham Norton to boycott Eurovision, because of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Leila White from London Palestine Action says, “Graham Norton should listen to Palestinians and heed their call for a boycott of Israel until it stops its systematic denial of Palestinians rights. We say no to pinkwashing, yes to BDS!”
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki has urged European nations to sanction Israel for illegally grabbing Palestinian land, saying the US Trump administration’s expected peace plan will do nothing to bring about Middle East peace. “They have to start thinking about sanctions, boycotting, Israeli policies, actions, the relationship, review their strategic bilateral relations with Israel — as [the] European Union and as individual countries,” al-Maliki told Mondoweiss.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is applying Jewish myth, scripture, and ancient history to a highly political Jewish agenda– defending Zionism– that’s become enthralled to secular ideas of power. Calling anti-Zionism antisemitism is not a lesson in Jewish history, it’s an exercise in the delegitimisation of another people’s historic experience.
We are witnessing the loss of biodiversity at rates never before seen in human history. According to the world’s largest assessment of biodiversity nearly a million species face extinction if humans do not fundamentally change our relationship with the natural world. Dr. Michelle Lim says the world’s legal, institutional, and economic systems must be reformed entirely in order to halt the continued loss of nature, and that listening to Indigenous communities is an essential first step.
As a US carrier steams toward Iran, Trump risks another disastrous neoconservative war in the Middle East. The pundits and pols who supported the Iraq war, from Joe Biden to Jeffrey Goldberg to Roger Cohen, still have not accounted for that tragic error; and they could clear their account nobly today by coming out against any war with Iran based on sad experience.
Dareen Tatour writes, “The anniversary of the Nakba comes every May. But we, the Palestinians of 1948, live in memory of the Nakba in different circumstances than all other Palestinians. Here from within Israel, we can hear the sirens declare the beginning of the celebration observed by those who occupied us while we are still deeply rooted inside of our homeland We suffer because we feel alienated in our own country, we shout and scream and no one hears us.”
Jared Kushner recently claimed Palestinians have “gotten more aid than any group of people in history, and what we have to show for it is really not much”. But he missed Israel. Israel beats Palestine on this count, and it’s much worse.
Cultural workers in Gaza call on the world to boycott the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Tel Aviv, and announce the creation of the Gazavision festival: “Even when Israel bombs us, imprisons our men, women and children, kills and maims thousands of Palestinian protesters on the Great Return March and does everything to silence our voices, we will continue to sing.”
Aseel Baidoun and her husband Ameer Malhees talk to Mondoweiss’s Yumna Patel about how a routine West Bank traffic stop turned into Israeli soldiers beating Malhees and a friend who was traveling with them: “When we got out of sight of anyone, one soldier grabbed my neck and pushed me up against the wall,” Malhees told Mondoweiss. “They started beating me, hitting me in my stomach, my face.” He recalls the soldiers telling him to tell his wife to ‘shut up, or else we will do the same to her.'”