New York Mayor Bill de Blasio gave the “simple, clear, progressive case for the state of Israel” at AIPAC this morning. He touched again and again on the Jewish history of persecution and “exclusion” and “expulsion” and never acknowledged that 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled from their lands at the birth of Israel in 1947-49. As such, his speech was a monument of Democratic denial of the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe. 

President Donald Trump recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory on Monday, stating Israel depends on the lands seized from Syria in the 1967 war for “defense, and perhaps offense” from an array of enemies in the Middle East naming Hizbollah in Syria, Iran, and the Gaza Strip.

The AIPAC policy conference in Washington began Sunday on a defensive note, with the Israel lobby organization’s chief executive saying that Israel’s friends face a terrible new challenge: taking on “the scurrilous charge of dual loyalty” and declaring “The intense hatred of Israel is now creeping from the margins to the center of our politics.” 

Israel topped the Gaza fence with 10 added feet of barbed wire in anticipation of the million demonstrators called to mark the one year anniversary of the Great March of Return next week. Despite the added fence, soldiers killed two Palestinian men at demonstrations yesterday, bringing the number of dead to 257.

Beto O’Rourke says at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that Israeli human rights violations hurt the U.S. “These truths that we hold so dear — that we are all created equal– ‘all of us’ needs to mean, ‘All of us,’ not relationships of convenience for short term security gains but relationships that allow us to continue to be the example for so much of the rest of the world.”

In May 2017, Donald Trump became the first sitting US president to visit the Western Wall. Now other international officials are following suit– despite the fact that it is illegally-annexed territory. A report from Raphael Ahren of the Times of Israel.

A few months after telling AIPAC that “it’s such a great feeling” for an Israeli to know that AIPAC has his back, New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman is about to have that great feeling again. He’s speaking at AIPAC on Sunday in Washington, though the organization doesn’t mention his affiliation with the Times.

As Israeli elections draw even closer, one politician is making headway, and headlines, for his unique –and surprisingly popular — blend of libertarian extreme free-market ideas and far-right Jewish supremacist ideologies. “I think Moshe Feiglin is more radical than the Kahanists,” Yossi Gurvitz tells Mondoweiss, citing Feiglin’s open calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide. “He is a much better marketer of these ideas.”

Faculty at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY have been threatened with a lawsuit, smeared in the right-wing press, and received threatening letters and emails. City University of New York faculty have issued a statement to clarify the recent events at Kingsborough Community College, and sound the alarm to others who may be in the crosshairs of these right-wing groups.

Many Democratic candidates for president are skipping the AIPAC conference because it’s offering a red carpet to a racist, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israel prime minister’s explicit slurs of Arabs have alarmed American progressives. But Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bill de Blasio and the New York Times haven’t noticed.