In March 2016 the United Nations Human Rights Council mandated a database of companies profiting from Israel’s settlements. Originally due in 2017, its publication remains in limbo as the release was delayed several times.  However, a similar database on Myanmar was ordered in September 2018 and completed a year later. 

Every Fall architecturally distinct buildings and grounds in Jerusalem treat the public to free tours as part of Open House Jerusalem. This year, for the first time, the festival was protested after it promoted guided tours at a site in the West Bank and programs in Jerusalem run by a settler organization.

Conservative donors have skewed the American Jewish establishment to support the occupation, said many speakers at the J Street conference. The liberal Zionist organization is mounting a power struggle inside the Jewish community. But those efforts do not include sanctions in opposition to the occupation.

Major presidential candidates are now supporting conditioning US aid to Israel. Josh Ruebner says it is up to us to support these candidates’ steps in the right direction while at the same time acknowledging that none of them go nearly far enough. “With continued education, determined and strategic organizing and mobilizing, we will get them there,” Ruebner writes.

The Israeli Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday to uphold the state’s decision to deport Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine Director Omar Shakir, over accusations that he advocates for the BDS movement.

After 41 days on hunger strike and more than two months under administrative detention in Israeli prison, 24-year-old Heba al-Labadi was released back to her home in Jordan on Wednesday to much fanfare from the Jordanian public.

Insofar as the subject of conditioning Israel’s aid has permeated mainstream political discourse, it’s remained largely hypothetical. Now activists are calling on progressive Senators who have voiced support for conditioning aid to Israel to get behind a policy with actual teeth.

In order to play authentic religious music commemorating Bethlehem’s native son, the Amwaj Choir and Palestine Philharmonie needed a harpsichord. That search began a few years ago in Europe and culminated in Bethlehem in late October with the unveiling of a beautiful instrument.

Dan Gertler, Israeli looter of oil assets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is too corrupt for the Trump administration, which has ruled that he cannot do business in the U.S. But Alan Dershowitz has now registered as a lobbyist for Gertler, presumably to argue for the removal of Treasury Department sanctions against Gertler as a “malign” actor.

The abandonment of about a dozen outposts across northeastern Syria hardly constitutes a substantial drawdown of U.S. forces in the region. With the president either reshuffling troops in Syria or merely relocating them elsewhere in the Middle East and a new contingent of American forces deploying to Saudi Arabia, there will actually be a net gain in U.S. troops in the region at this moment of supposed reduction.