Zuheir al-Rajabi walks through his East Jerusalem neighborhood past Israeli flags hanging from the homes of his former neighbors who were forcibly evicted from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. “This is an occupation and nothing is going to stop them from enacting their policies,” al-Rajabi said. “They will do everything, arrest us, imprison us, and kick us out, just as they did with our neighbors.”
On June 26, 2021, Fatah loyalists from Mahmoud Abbas’s faction, some of which identified as undercover Palestinian security personnel, attacked Palestinian demonstrators with sticks and stones as they made their way to Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah, West Bank. Protesters marched following the extrajudicial killing of prominent opposition activist Nizar Banat by the Palestinian Authority in Hebron three days ago.
The Scientific American has removed a piece calling for solidarity with Palestinians from its website after being pressured by pro-Israel groups.
Israeli leftist David Grossman laments that Israel is not “home” for Jews. “It was meant to be the place in which you felt secure, in which your standing and your relations with your neighbors was never in doubt, in which there was no disagreement with anyone about whose home it was. It’s painful for me that still, after almost 73 years of sovereignty, and of war, we still haven’t arrived at a place in which we feel that real sense of comfort, that real sense of serenity and ease you’re meant to feel at home.”
More details have emerged on how a deal over vaccines broke down between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and what Palestinians want from a new deal.
Divisions over Israel will bring “disaster and disunity” for Jews in the U.S., Abraham Riesman writes in New York magazine in an article about his grandfather, an Israel lobbyist who helped cover up war crimes. Young Riesman says the massacres and imprisonment of Palestinians today makes Jews unsafe.
One Democratic State Campaign: The killing of opposition activist Nizar Al-Banat shows the status quo cannot continue. The countdown on the Palestinian Authority has begun.
The author Rob Nixon uses the phrase “slow violence” to refer to “the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many…crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today.” Slow violence is the defining condition of living as Palestinians: in between the sharp escalations of protracted conflict, the ongoing trauma of an existence under apartheid is typically not viewed as violence at all. When we demand freedom for Palestine we are not just demanding an end to military assaults on Gaza, we are demanding Palestinians to have a right to life, dignity, and freedom.
As Palestinian and Jewish educators, and members of the Seattle Education Association, we call on other brave individuals and institutions to join us in endorsing BDS.
Religious zealots have established an “outpost” settlement in West Bank lately and Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians protesting the landgrab. The story is getting wide coverage in Palestine but not in the United States, though these lands are the supposed basis of a “Palestinian state.”