This week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee adopted the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020 (S. 3176). It’s a goodie bag for “The Only Democracy in the Middle East.”

As the ICC weighs its jurisdiction to rule on the matter of human rights abuses in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, over 4,500–including Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Udi Adiv, Lia Tarachansky and more–petition for the court to act now.

Ramzy Baroud writes Abbas is not serious about terminating the agreements with Israel. Instead, this is a strategy of protracted inaction and ambiguity.

Is Judaism a religion, a race, or a people? Sivan Tal untangles how Judaism is perceived and shaped by the Zionist ideology, and how this impacts our understanding of racism and antisemitism.

This May 31 marks 10 years since Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza Humanitarian Flotilla in international waters and killed 10 people. Norman Finkelstein, one of the world’s most effective critics of Israel, is observing the occasion with a persuasive indictment of Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, for refusing to take legal action over Israel’s lethal attack on the Mavi Marmara, the Flotilla’s flagship.

The COVID-19 shutdown has put a stop to campus life in America, but it has not stopped advocates for Israel from attacking Israel’s academic critics, trying to banish their thinking and teaching from universities. Nor has it stopped academics and students who support Palestine from fighting back and winning.

Since the beginning of April, Israeli forces have been documented shooting holes into the water tanks on the rooftops of people’s homes in Kafr Qaddum. B’Tselem has concluded that “the shooting is deliberate”, and described the damage to the tanks as “sheer abuse” and “an illegal act of collective punishment.”

Mahmoud Abbas declared that the Palestinians are ending all agreements with Israel and the US. But a real break from the Oslo Accords would also include ending the fiction of the two-state solution.

Netanyahu wants annexation because he thinks it will keep him from being convicted on corruption charges. The effect on Palestinians — more loss of land with no real action by the international community — would be very dangerous indeed.

With the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s passage of the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020 last week, the current Congress is now poised to enact with little transparency its most far-reaching bill related to Israel at the height of a national public health emergency.