Israel opened a new road in the central occupied West Bank on Thursday with an eight-meter wall separating Palestinian and Israeli traffic, leading many to deem the route “Apartheid Road.”

Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released statistics ahead of the new year that showed a 69 percent increase in settler attacks on Palestinians in 2018 compared to 2017. OCHA recorded 265 incidents in which Israeli residents of the West Bank allegedly targeted Palestinians or their property. In total, 115 Palestinians were injured in those attacks and 7,900 trees and 540 vehicles were destroyed.

The decision by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to withdraw an award to Angela Davis because of her support for BDS has become a giant embarrassment to the Institute and the Jewish groups that put pressure on it to reconsider. Both the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center and the Birmingham Jewish Federations have tried to walk back statements critical of the award.

Last week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the Canada Revenue Agency, under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, began an audit of the Jewish National Fund over projects linked to the Israeli military.

Amos Oz was a great storyteller, and the last vibrant connection to the Shoah generation. In his work, he sought to ennoble Israel’s creation by using his parents’ story of fleeing Europe to show how unsafe Jews are in the west. He was an Israeli provincial, and his death is a great blow to Zionism, which has few idealistic lights left to uphold.

Rabbi Michael Davis writes to Rabbi David Stern, a leader of Reform rabbis in America: A year has passed since you returned “shaken” from a visit to the “prison” of the West Bank. I have a collegial challenge. Invite a Palestinian to speak from the same Dallas pulpit from which you gave a sermon that has been widely circulated. And call on your congregants to oppose Congressional legislation that would punish advocacy for BDS.

Last year Birthright began offering academic study abroad programs to U.S. college students. Educator Liz Rose writes about the course descriptions and what they say about how Birthright represents Israel and Palestinians: “Israel is represented as minding its own business, just trying to survive. Students are told they will talk with the Jewish residents near Gaza, but they won’t speak with Gazans or hear their perspective.”

In late December, dozens of humanitarian organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and local municipalities across the West Bank and Gaza were faced with a harsh reality: grants they had been promised for 2019 from USAID, one of the largest and most important humanitarian agencies in the region, would not be coming. The decision to shut down USAID in the West Bank and Gaza is the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump administration to force Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to the negotiating table.

Zillah Eisenstein comments on the controversies within the Women’s March, “‘We’, the big we, need to come together committed to moving with and through our limitations and contradictions to find a world free of exploitation and racial hatreds especially white supremacy, antisemitism, xenophobia, capitalism, nationalisms, misogyny and its gender binaries.”

Angela Y. Davis on the cancellation of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award: “Although the BCRI refused my requests to reveal the substantive reasons for this action, I later learned that my long-term support of justice for Palestine was at issue.  This seemed particularly unfortunate, given that my own freedom was secured – and indeed my life was saved – by a vast international movement. And I have devoted much of my own activism to international solidarity and, specifically, to linking struggles in other parts of the world to U.S. grassroots campaigns against police violence, the prison industrial complex, and racism more broadly.  The rescinding of this invitation was thus not primarily an attack against me but rather against the spirit of the indivisibility of justice.”