Israeli citizens opposed to their government’s policies of oppression, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing ask Jennifer Lopez to honor the Palestinian call for BDS and cancel her upcoming concert in Tel Aviv.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is scheduled to announce his support for a new resolution that targets the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement today. “I have long believed that the BDS effort is a profoundly biased campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel, and I look forward to Congress passing the resolution with overwhelming bipartisan support,” Schumer told the online publication Jewish Insider.
On Tuesday Palestinians in the Gaza Strip cursed at Arab officials and burned placards of President Donald Trump in protest of the administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” summit in Bahrain to discuss economic aspects of the long-awaited “deal of the century.” Yasmin Abu Arafa, a civil rights activist, told Mondoweiss: “After long years of struggle and fighting, a new Oslo seems to be imposed upon us by the U.S. But this will not happen again as in 1993.”
Aya Al Ghazzawi says that the Trump administration Bahrain conference is another step in the continual dehumanization of the Palestinian people. “It says that the blood of the Palestinian martyrs and the people’s long suffering can be bargained upon,” Al Ghazzawi writes, “That money can make up to Palestinians for the ongoing ethnic cleansing which began in 1948. That the incremental genocide inflicted by Israel on Palestinians can be forgotten for crumbs of bread and a trivial sum of money.”
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees raised $110 million at a pledging meet in New York on Tuesday, but warned that it still needs more cash and may have to cut food handouts to some 1 million Gaza residents over the summer, and might not be able to open schools. The UNRWA event was held on the same day as the administration of US President Donald Trump launched its long-awaited and controversial plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians in Bahrain.
Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon published an opinion piece in the New York Times suggesting that the way forward for Palestinians could only be a “surrender” of their national ambitions, and to commit a “national suicide”.
Leading Middle East and Islamic studies scholars call on President Trump immediately to pull back from the brink of a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran: “It is clear to us that the human, diplomatic, legal, political, and economic costs to both countries, the Persian Gulf and larger Middle East, the global economy and the global system of international humanitarian law of a US attack would be even more devastating than was the US invasion of Iraq sixteen years ago.”
The US ambassador to Israel recently argued that Israel has the right to annex much of the West Bank. Jonathan Cook writes that Israeli officials have been preparing for this moment for more than half a century, since the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza were seized back in 1967.
From a cooking gas shop to a women’s collective making toys from recyclables, meet Gaza’s entrepreneurs who are adapting to a crumbling environment that the UN says will become “unliveable,” in less than a year.
The framing of the Palestinian struggle within diplomatic language as a “conflict” serves to convert settler-colonial violence and genocidal erasure of the indigenous people into a diplomatic dispute. Denijal Jegic writes, “as long as settler-colonial erasure remains the underlying structure, no economic relief or political measure could effectively benefit Palestinians.”