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The majority of Palestinian children living in areas of Gaza hardest-hit during an escalation with Israel are showing signs of severe emotional distress and trauma, including frequent bed wetting and nightmares. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA Images)

At a family gathering last May, everyone in Basma Ismail Kurd’s family was looking forward to her niece playing doctor. But after the last escalation between Israel and Hamas, and witnessing death and destruction around her, she no longer wants to become a physician. What do you tell a ten-year-old who has witnessed carnage around her, when you’re also traumatized yourself?

As Israelis were evacuated from Jewish-only communities in the Galilee due to fires this month, Hatim Kanaaneh reflects, “Are you aware that within recent memory your own residential locales had Palestinian names and were inhabited by humans, some of whom with features not really different from your own and who were before their expulsion actually part of the best educated nation in the Middle East? They lived right where you live now but without all those fire-hazardous pines.”

Progressive groups condemned Joe Biden’s embrace of Israeli PM Naftali Bennett yesterday and the president’s vow to continue military aid to Israel, with no reference to its apartheid policies against Palestinians. Israel’s advocates say that Bennett got everything that he wanted from the meeting, including a suggestion the U.S. would use force against Iran.

Yair Rosenberg (via Twitter) with Israel's apartheid wall.

Pro-Israel writers have dismissed all criticism, opposition and even enmity to Israel and its actions as springing from an ancient malady, antisemitism. They thereby erase the true history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in a so-far successful effort to discredit the critics. Israel’s actions exist very much in history, and its supporters use very sharp elbows and knees to get its way.