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The New York Times would never run an article asking a very legitimate question, “Is Zionism racist?” But it ran a full-page to answer whether BDS is anti-Semitic. The article was surprisingly fair to BDS, including the explanation that Israel supporters feel threatened by BDS because the call for “full equality” for Palestinian citizens would undermine the basis of the “Jewish state.”
On Saturday, organizers of the Berlin Radical Queer March instructed police to block and ban the participation of the Queers for Palestine contingent, a group of 500 Arab and Jewish-led marchers. Queers for Palestine write: “The very fact that we need to defend ourselves against physical and police violence at a ‘radical queer march’ is infuriating and deeply shameful.”
Five years ago organized rock climbing in Palestine was non-existent. Then two young American climbing enthusiasts began developing rock climbing sites near Ramallah and refugee camps around the West Bank. “You know there are beautiful areas around Ramallah, but we would not go there if we didn’t climb,” local climber Momen Naeem tells Mondoweiss. “It makes people love the land, makes you love this place more.”
David Lloyd writes that congressional resolutions that affirm the duplicitous language of Zionist lobbies and apologists for apartheid will have little impact on the continuing growth of the BDS movement, “but ‘progressives’ who endorse them stand to lose sight of what is crucial to all fundamental political change: the moral force of social movements out of which, from abolitionism to civil rights to BDS, all substantial transformation has come.”
In an interview on July 26, Vermont Senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said he would “absolutely” consider cutting military aid to Israel as leverage to change their government’s actions.
Israeli forces killed and maimed some 2,800 Palestinian children in 2018, the highest number in years, and yet were not mentioned on an annual United Nations blacklist of armed forces that commit atrocities against youth.
Asked on July 13 what he would do to pressure Israel to end the occupation and its “atrocities” against Palestinians, Beto O’Rourke said “both sides” experience fear from violence and “both sides” have bad leaders.
Israel and the U.S. are forging a stronger alliance with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Why assume Prince Mohammed can hold on to power indefinitely? Saudi royals are surely aware that hostility in the Arab world to Prince Mohammed is on the rise, and they have acted decisively to remove leaders in the past.
Larry Wolf, a New York musician, got involved in Palestinian solidarity for the first time in his late 60s when he heard high school classmates justify the 2014 Israeli onslaught on Gaza because Palestinians were terrorists and monsters. Now he is an activist. “Palestinians need equal rights– that’s the whole purpose of my getting involved– and there’s still a strong feeling that Judaism is at risk of losing itself, if it hasn’t already,” he says.