“$600 for you, $500,000,000 to Israel.” When the COVID-19 relief bill in the Congress began circulating many commentators, including in the mainstream, have jumped on the fact that the massive legislation is bundled alongside other appropriations that include $500 million in military aid to Israel.

Author Tamir Sorek responds to Hatim Kanaaneh’s review of his book, “The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad.”

If there’s hope for real change in Palestine with the next U.S. administration, we’re going to need an honest conversation about the nature of Zionism. Mondoweiss is truth-telling journalism in the interest of justice. And we need your support today. We have a new $20,000 challenge on the table to raise before the end of the year. Will you help us match it?

The murder by Israeli soldiers of Ali Abu Alia was the 6th killing of a Palestinian child in the occupied West Bank this year. And though Israeli soldiers have killed 155 children in West Bank in recent years, they have had near complete impunity– a process “unworthy of a country that proclaims it lives by rule of law,” the U.N. says. And liberal Zionist organizations maintain that impunity by insisting Israel keep getting U.S. military aid.

It is impossible for an Israeli historian who doesn’t reject Zionism to understand Galilee resistance leader Tawfiq Zayyad, whose life shows, Mere Palestinian existence is undesirable in the eyes of the average Jewish Israeli, writes Hatim Kanaaneh.

The New York Times finally apologized for false reporting on jihadism by Rukmini Callimachi, who “has a pattern of outsourcing much of her analysis to terrorologists such as those at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and its spinoffs.” But Callimachi was supplying what the NYT wanted.

Israel will begin its national COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Saturday, but Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are seemingly still months away from receiving a vaccine.

Former general turned far-right politician Effi Eitam lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan and has long advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories, as well as the crushing of basic civil rights for non-Jews inside Israel. He is also Benjamin Netanyahu’s choice to be the next leader of Yad Vashem, the world-renowned Holocaust museum.

Anan Ameri’s memoir “The Wandering Palestinian” is beautifully written in the tradition of Arab story telling. Its humorous and poignant chapters travel a reader to Beirut, Detroit, Washington, and Jerusalem, interweaving the forty-year personal narrative of a free spirited Arab woman who arrives in the USA in 1974, with the larger issues of migration, racism, sexism, and institution building.

This year has been a slog, but in the spirit of the holiday season, here are some of the victories of 2020.