Walaa Al Ghussein launched a GoFundMe campaign in late December to support her MA at CUNY. She recently extended her fundraising goal after she was notified the university sent her to collections. She has already raised enough money to cover her outstanding debt and registering her thesis. This last push it to pay off the creditors. 

Rashida Tlaib has been getting criticized for calling Donald Trump a “motherfucker” but Nada Elia writes that she is thankful for Tlaib’s willingness to challenge the pressure to be civil: “I am thankful for her for breaking taboos, and having the courage to say what many think.  Let us remember what else she has spoken, which would be considered a “profanity” by her peers.  She said the hitherto unspeakable, about Palestine: one country, because separate but equal doesn’t work anywhere.”

Something that has never happened before is about to happen in the U.S. Senate: there’s going to be a wide-open battle over Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), as part of efforts to end the government shutdown, no less! The Senate is due to debate S.1, the first Senate bill of the new session, and Marco Rubio claims that a “significant” number of Democrats support BDS.

Israeli authorities have arrested five Israeli settlers suspected in the killing of 48-year-old Palestinian woman Aisha al-Rabi last month, according to the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Al-Rabi was killed in October 2018 when a group of settlers attacked her and her husband’s car with rocks on a West Bank highway. The mother of eight sustained a severe head injury that killed her, while her husband and young daughter sustained light wounds.

Israeli forces have reportedly threatened to expel the family of 28-year-old Saleh Barghouthi, who was killed by Israeli special forces last month, from their home in the central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah, unless Saleh’s brother Assem turns himself into police. The practice of assigning collective responsibility has been widely condemned.

Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, dares to say that the two-state solution looks like “a cruel joke,” that some Jews regard equality in one state as a possible solution, and that BDS is gaining traction in the U.S. His article on the schism between US and Israeli Jews goes along with Michelle Goldberg’s column saying anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

Days after the New York Times said Israel’s killing of a Gaza medic was a possible war crime, Israeli forces targeted medical personnel at the Gaza fence on January 4 and wounded 6 of them, including one who was hit with a teargas canister while he was in an ambulance, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reports.

Prominent Palestinian-Danish debater Fathi El-Abed, head of the Danish-Palestinian Friendship Society, has been excluded from a public pro-Israel event due to take place January 6, due to his political views opposing Zionism.

It has been a whirlwind of a week in Israeli politics as the country’s Israeli election campaign is moves full speed ahead following a call for elections this April.

The late Amos Oz’s lecture from last year, translated and analyzed by Jonathan Ofir, is a summary of his political credo: Palestinians suffer from the “illness” of “Recontritis,” the desire to return to a land that has disappeared. And Zionists must use violence to maintain their own place on that land.