Two Palestinians were injured on Friday as Israeli forces attacked dozens of protesters taking part in the weekly anti-settlements protest in the village of Kufur Qaddoum, near Qalqilia in the central occupied West Bank, said Mourad Shtewi, coordinator of the popular resistance in the village. An Israeli army bulldozer was filmed pushing large rocks towards the protesters in the village, injuring a Palestinian child, identified as Mo’men Shtewi, 9, who was treated at the scene.
Should billionaires exist? Phil Weiss says the question of the day echoes and exposes the famous question, Does Israel have a right to exist? “The issue ought to be dealt with in the same detached manner as Sanders and others have handled the billionaire question,” Weiss writes.
Writer Eric Flamm says after four trips to Israel, his 15-year-old son has become an anti-Zionist and supports BDS. “Because he couldn’t support the notion that in Israel the Jews received preferential treatment over Palestinians in all aspects of life, such as education, housing, employment, and access to justice.”
Malek Issa, 8, was shot in the face with a rubber-coated bullet by an Israeli police officer as he was on his way home February 15 in occupied Jerusalem. Israeli police said an officer claimed to have fired his weapon at a wall for “calibration” purposes, and thought Issa was hit by an alleged Palestinian stone-thrower.
The Shift is a weekly politics newsletter from Michael Arria taking you to the front…
In a humorous video intended to dispel the rumors about intense tensions within the “cockpit” of four leaders of the Blue and White party – Benjamin Gantz, Yair Lapid, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, and Gabi Ashkenazi – Lapid is heard telling Ashkenazi that “Bogie was quite a murderer in the army, in his military career.”
Israel is planning to build a new Jewish settlement of 6,000 to 9,000 units in the Atarot area of East Jerusalem — on a swath of land that was slated by US President Donald Trump’s peace plan to go to the Palestinians.
Brad Parker explains, “Everybody can understand the physical violence against a child. I think that’s a universal red line that exists for most people. And in that, I think was the overarching sort of consideration in shaping the campaign. We wanted to have something that was really basic, straightforward, accessible, relatable so that it expanded the movement and also complemented the other things that were happening.”
Netanyahu’s discussion of Palestinian submission to the “radical” and “historic” terms of the Trump “peace plan” sounds very much like surrender. Recognize Israel as “the Jewish state,” accept Israeli sovereignty over much of the West Bank, including every Jewish settlement. Accept Israeli military control forever. Netanyahu laid out these terms in a speech to rightwing American Jews from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Trump’s “Deal of the Century” ends the two-state paradigm by endorsing Israel’s “Nationality Law” of 2018 and longstanding Zionist and biblical assertions about Jewish claims to the land and the absence of national rights of the indigenous population: the Palestinians.