“I look back [with] regret at Gaza,” Ben Rhodes confesses at J Street. While another Obama official Tommy Vietor says the Yemen war was “wrong” and a “disaster.” And NY City Councilman Brad Lander says he regrets keeping quiet about Palestinian human rights over 10 years of defending Israel. “I was pushed to find more courage,” he says.

The Israeli military has closed the case files of three Palestinians who were killed by its forces in 2018, prompting backlash from rights groups like B’Tselem who initially investigated the killings. “At the end of the day, these belated so-called investigations, ended in whitewashing,” B’Tselem said in a press release on Monday.

“All of them means all of them.” Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri steps down after two weeks of protests across the country where over a million Lebanese from all faiths joined together in leaderless and nationwide anti-government demonstrations, in which the agenda has expanded from avoiding taxes to regime change.

UMass Amherst faculty issue an open letter pushing back on a statement by Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy that was critical of the upcoming panel “Criminalizing Dissent: The Attack on BDS and American Democracy.”

Israeli defense ministry officials want to upend the definition in international law of the settlements as a war crime by allowing settlers buy as private property the plots of occupied land their illegal homes currently stand on.

A major theme has emerged at this year’s annual J Street conference: conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel. This lines up with a wider shift that seems to be happening throughout the country. An October 25 report from the centrist Center for American Progress shows 56% of voters say they’d condition aid if the Israeli government continues to expand settlements or ends up annexing the West Bank. That number goes up to 71% when applied only to Democratic voters.

Democrats are pushing to pass a watered-down and toothless version of a resolution supporting a negotiated two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the coming weeks, and yet Republicans say even this contradicts the Trump Administration’s peace plan. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the resolution is designed to “score points against the President” and “cut the Administration’s peace process off at the knees, ensuring that any political proposal released by the Administration already has the black mark of a rebuke by the House of Representatives.”

In Gaza on Friday, 95 Palestinian civilians, including 43 children, a woman, 2 paramedics and a journalist, were shot and injured by Israeli forces, who fired live rounds against peaceful Palestinian protesters at the 80th Great March of Return.

“We oppose Zionism. We oppose the role that Zionists play in the diaspora,” historian Jack Jacobs explains Bundism at the Yivo Institute in New York, on a breakthrough panel that included Molly Crabapple calling for one democratic state to whoops and applause and Jacob Plitman saying his Zionism was “shattered” after one encounter with Palestinians and learning their story.

Israel has demolished a record number of homes in occupied East Jerusalem in 2019, the most in the past 15 years, Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported on Thursday. More than 140 Palestinian homes were demolished, resulting in the displacement of 238 Palestinians.