Meta announced that it will allow calls for violence against Russian soldiers to be posted on Facebook and Instagram. Yet, under flimsy pretexts, the Facebook company has launched systematic campaigns against Palestinian activists to restrict content that reveals the true story of victims and victimizers. In one way or another, the western media have been trying to hide the brutal crimes and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians for decades.
Activists for Palestine are considering the knock-on effects of the western support for Ukrainian resistance. Does the Zionist lobby think that they can carry on with their anti-BDS bashing as usual, once the Ukraine crisis is no longer in the news? Or are we witnessing a qualitative shift? The number of social media posts talking about the bravery of Ukrainian women, usually in fatigues and holding a gun, are too numerous to count. While pro-Palestinian organizations continue to have their social media posts censored for milder fare.
As Doaa Alremeili watches Israel welcoming Ukrainian Jewish refugees who will join its army and oppress Palestinians, she dreams of getting out of besieged Gaza and studying in Egypt. “I have survived four wars so far. And every level gets more difficult to pass. In every war of them, I was unarmed, unprotected and waiting for death. I’m in my late twenties and I have never stepped out of Gaza. I don’t know what Jerusalem really looks like or the Pyramids or Mecca or Minnesota.”
H.R. 2748 is the Israel Relations Normalization Act of 2021. It just passed the House of Representatives and the Senate last week. It expands the Abraham Accords, Trump-era weapons and business deals between apartheid Israel and other authoritarian regimes. These deals bribe Arab countries in the region to both ignore Israel’s settler colonialism and constant human rights violations. When we hear the phrases Normalizing and Israel, we should always read Normalizing Israel’s impunity and violence.
When Israel slaughtered hundreds of civilians in Gaza, mainstream journalists and politicians said the situation was too “complicated” to come out against such actions. Now they are cheerleaders for Ukrainian resistance, by any means, to military invasion and missile attacks. And Benny Gantz who bragged about bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age, is a hero to the Democratic Party. Yes there is an official propaganda line in the U.S., and journalists lost their mainstream careers for doing in Palestine what journalists routinely do in the Ukraine now.
Noura Erakat writes in the book, “A Land With a People,” that the volume tackles power head-on, “charting the struggle against Zionism within the Jewish communities that Zionism purportedly serves. Its anti-Zionist Jewish stories are critical to decolonization.” Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh relates that the book traces some of his own history with the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace,” as he struggled to bring Palestinian narratives to a global audience.
It was supposed to be the “Iron Dome” to stop social media attacks on Israel, but the apartheid reports just kept coming and coming! Act.IL, the pro-Israel app at least partially funded by the country’s government, has now been deactivated after 5 years.
Phil Weiss and Yakov Hirsch discuss the cultural sources of pro-Israel movements in American politics. Hirsch examines what he calls “hasbara culture” – the ways that a discourse of Jewish victimhood has conquered Jewish, Israeli, and even American political culture.
The Illinois state investment board voted to divest from Unilever because its subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s has decided to stop selling in occupied Palestinian territories. “We find the IIPB’s punitive actions against companies exercising their free speech rights to engage in boycott to be patently unjust,” write a group of Illinois rabbis and cantors.
Israel’s rightwing parliament overwhelmingly passed a permanent law barring the naturalization of Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza married to Israeli citizens yesterday. The law in earlier forms has been cited as an “apartheid” law by human rights organizations, but even Israeli centrists voted for it with “a heavy heart.” While the Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked celebrated the law as a triumph of the Jewish state.