Joe Biden once vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” but now he is looking to rebuild relations and many expect normalization with Israel to be on the agenda.

Many in the Palestine movement have supported the work of the Mapping Project but there have been critics as well. Nora Lester Murad writes that while the project is a Herculean effort that provides lots of useful information, it is a poor piece of research and a destructive piece of activism.

Over the last year, we’ve made a conscious commitment to our readers and the entire Palestinian freedom movement: to build a newsroom for all of Palestine. We’re thrilled to announce two new hires that move us decisively in that direction: Faris Giacaman as Managing Editor, and Mariam Barghouti as Senior Palestine Correspondent.

The Bennett/Lapid “government of change” has collapsed under pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. New elections are set for October, but there is no alternative to apartheid on the Israeli horizon.

Liberal Zionist author Eric Alterman tells the Israeli left he’s cutting it out of his will. “I’m sorry, I’m abandoning you and your colleagues. I used to have in my will Israeli peace groups, I’m changing my will and I’m funding American Jewish scholarly and charitable institutions.” Why? “I feel like Israel has said to American Jews, we’re going on our way, and you can take it or leave it.”

After relentless direct action and a number of arrests, Palestine Action has made business in Britain’s capital inoperable for Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems.

The New York Times today was shamed into publishing an investigation into who killed the distinguished Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — nearly 6 weeks after she died, and after other news organizations investigated and said, an Israeli soldier killed her. The Times echoes those investigations, concluding that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh “was fired from the approximate position of an Israeli military vehicle,” but it does little to expose Israel’s lies and obfuscation in the case.

Throughout her five decade long career, renowned Palestinian artist Samia Halaby has been known for her stunning abstract expressionist works, as well as her outspoken activism. Her latest project, Drawing the Kafr Qassem Massacre, raises the question of how Halaby addresses and locates politics in her work – and whether her Marxist understanding of politics is fast receding from an art world increasingly focused on questions of political efficacy. 

Today’s ‘New York Times’ article on the stalled Iran nuclear deal negotiations could have been ghost-written by Israel’s propaganda apparatus. Its selection of experts is comical: five paragraphs of analysis by Dennis Ross and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Both are ceaseless advocates for Israel.

National Public Radio aired a long story yesterday featuring a demand by the brother of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh that the United States investigate her killing in Jenin on May 11 and keep Israel out of the case. So some American media continue to seek to undermine Israel’s impunity– and push Joe Biden not to dodge the matter, as he surely wants to.