Last year, a huge global outpouring convinced Argentina to cancel a planned friendly match in Jerusalem. Now, BDS activists are attempting to halt a match scheduled between the Argentina and Uruguay national football teams to be held in Tel Aviv.
Last week Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli security official, urged American Jews at J Street to restrain Israel’s “unjust” war in Palestine because it fuels anti-Semitism around the world. The statement is remarkable because that view is generally seen as anathema: saying that Israel’s actions have any role in the growth of anti-Semitism.
Meir Shamgar, former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, passed away on October 19. Benjamin Netanyahu said he “played an important role in shaping Israel’s legal foundations, including the legal policy in Judea and Samaria,” and Dr. Uri Weiss agrees. “Judge Shamgar was the chief architect of the Israeli legal regime of occupation, settlement construction, and apartheid,” Weiss explains.
Hannah Gurman reviews Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism: “Ultimately, Weiss and other neoconservative analysts of contemporary anti-semitism force Jews into a cynical politics that pits Jewish survival against other movements for social justice. Progressives have a more compelling vision to offer in which a politics of solidarity addresses threats against Jewish communities not at the expense of other “others,” but alongside them.”
Pete Buttigieg on the “horrifying” humanitarian crisis in Gaza: “Like many failures, this failure has many fathers. I think that not only should Israel be respecting the human rights of people in Gaza, but Egypt could be doing things differently. The international community could do a better job, the U.S. could do a better job, and, obviously, I’m not a fan of Hamas either.”
Palestinian social media erupted over the weekend as people expressed their outrage over a leaked video showing and Israeli border police officer shooting a Palestinian in the back as the man walked away from the officers, his hands raised in the air.
“We won’t surrender to settler violence, and will stand with Palestinian farmers.” About 100 activists from Rabbis for Human Rights and an Israeli grassroots movement Standing Together sought to protect Palestinian farrmers harvesting olives in the occupied West Bank, but were driven out by the Israeli army and Border Police forces, the Jerusalem Post reports.
Jared Kushner told a conference of business leaders in Saudi Arabia that, “Israel is not the cause of all the suffering of the Palestinian people.” Haider Eid says Kushner’s combination of racism, Orientalism, and colonialism can only be described as “Palestinophobia.”
On Thursday, by the Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui asked Biden whether he’d consider leveraging aid to Israel to curb settlement expansion. “Not me. Look, I have been on record from very early on opposed to settlements, and I think it’s a mistake,” Biden told the reporter, “And Netanyahu knows my position. But the idea that we would draw military assistance from Israel, on the condition that they change a specific policy, I find it to be absolutely outrageous.”
In recent weeks, the chancellors at the University of Illinois and University of Massachusetts have targeted pro-Palestinian voices on their respective campuses. The Illinois Student Government responded by passing a resolution titled “Condemning Ignorance of Racism and Equating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism,” but the attacks come amidst a wider crackdown on such perspectives which is being fueled by the Trump administration’s Department of Education.