Rafael Silver is a Jew, Israeli citizen and a veteran of a combat unit in the Israeli army. He left Israel in 2001 because he could no longer be a part of a system that practices apartheid against the Palestinian people.  “I do not use the word apartheid lightly but instead reluctantly,” he writes. “I choose to use this word to describe the reality the Palestinian people have been enduring for generations because I have seen it in action with my own eyes.  I have enforced it during my military service in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and supported it as an Israeli taxpayer.”  

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has signed legislation to expand the state’s anti-BDS law, and adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism.

The rightwing Israel lobby is enraged by the new report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. accusing Israel of “apartheid”– a “landmark moment of recognition of the lived reality of millions of Palestinians,” says Amnesty International. But J Street has had nothing to say about the report. It surely hopes it will go away, because these reports foster demands among progressives to actually do something about human rights violations beyond acknowledging their existence.

Madeleine Albright’s honest appraisal of Iraq sanctions highlighted the brutality of U.S. foreign policy

Madeleine Albright has died at the age of 84. She will be most remembered for a moment of candor in a 1996 television interview that is still shocking 26 years after it first aired.

Determined to Stay: Palestinian Youth Fight for Their Village is a valuable resource that centers Palestinian experiences for young adult readers.

How dare anyone tell me
in these late years of my life
when I have seen everything and forgotten nothing
about the theft of an entire country
and the imprisonment of an entire people
that it is antisemitic
to believe in the rule of law

A new UN Human Rights Council report is the latest in a series by international and Israeli groups accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid. “There are pitiless features of Israel’s ‘apartness’ rule in the occupied Palestinian territory that were not practiced in southern Africa, such as segregated highways, high walls and extensive checkpoints, a barricaded population, missile strikes and tank shelling of a civilian population, and the abandonment of the Palestinians’ social welfare to the international community,” Michael Lynk’s report said. “With the eyes of the international community wide open, Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world.”

New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley used a fresh apartheid report, by U.N. special rapporteur Michael Lynk, to finally slip Amnesty International’s apartheid finding into the paper. Kingsley wrote that Lynk, a distinguished Canadian law professor appointed by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, had “accused Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the occupied territories.” He quickly summarized Lynk’s finding, gave Israel’s foreign ministry and other critics a chance to respond — and then, right at the end, mentioned that Amnesty, among others, had produced a “similar” report.

80% of Middle East Studies Association scholars voted to endorse the Palestinian call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions of Israel