From US government officials, to our biggest news broadcasters, and social media networks, Ukrainians were being applauded as heroes for going to whatever lengths to protect their land. The same exact things that Palestinians are labelled as terrorists for, imprisoned, and even killed.
“The first Intifada was a struggle to end Israeli occupation by establishing an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories,” political scientist Ian Lustick writes. “I supported that struggle. Tragically, it failed. Three decades and half a million settlers later, that objective is no longer attainable. The BDS movement has effectively taken its place as a grassroots popular movement, based on an absolute commitment to nonviolence, a long-term strategy, a fundamental commitment to equality, and insistence on the realization of Palestinian rights, rather than calling for a specific kind of institutional arrangement.”
“The Zionist left is the real enemy of freedom, of fighting the occupation in Israel, much more than the right wing is,” says Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. “They are the founding fathers for the settlement project. Who started it? Netanyahu, Begin, Sharon? No no no no no! Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin– Nobel Peace Prize winners, peacemakers– they are responsible. They also enable us Israelis to feel so good about ourselves. Because they were always the laundry of any crime. We have this prestigious, world-famous Supreme Court, this castle of liberalism and freedom, part of the Zionist left, and this Supreme Court enabled any crime of war, from the settlements to the tortures, everything went through the Supreme Court and everything was washed there, and it was accepted. If the Supreme Court says there are no torturing or the settlements are legal– so who are we to say or to think different?”
Democratic lawmakers harshly criticized Republicans who denied the 2020 presidential election results. Now some of them are linked to these same election deniers via AIPAC.
The Palestinian-Global Mental Health Network calls on clinicians globally and locally to demand that the Israeli state immediately release Ahmad Manasra.
This International Women’s Day, let us affirm that there can be no free homeland without free women, without free queers, and without free children as they rise above binaries, reach out across boundaries, laugh at society’s archaisms, and model the alternative.
Gaza continues to be at a major disadvantage in the pandemic due to the borderline functioning of the health care system after years of siege and repeated Israeli assaults and exhausted medical personnel. According to the World Health Organizations, 61.7% of the target population is fully vaccinated in the West Bank, 32.3% fully vaccinated in Gaza. The rate in Israel is 66 percent.
Ghada Hania responds to CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata who contrasted life in “civilized” Ukraine to places that have seen “conflict raging for decades” like Iraq, Afghanistan, or perhaps Palestine.
A highlight of the Israel lobby conference held at the National Press Club by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs last Friday was a speech by singer/songwriter Roger Waters in which he read from letters to musicians urging them not to play Israel in line with the call of the BDS campaign. When Australian singer Nick Cave performed in Israel in 2018, he rejected Roger Waters and Brian Eno’s call to respect the BDS boycott campaign, saying it was “cowardly and shameful.” Waters says he responded to the “louche” artist with disbelief, rage and sorrow. “We hurl our glasses in the fire of your arrogant unconcern and smash our bracelets on the rock of your implacable indifference.”
Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians over the past week, and 17 Palestinians since the start of 2022. Of the 17 Palestinians killed, three were children.