Lee Zeldin and House Republicans are resurrecting a bill that aims to outlaw boycotts of Israel

Israelis hope that their comprehensive military and economic alliance with the apartheid regime in South Africa is forgotten now that Amnesty International is leveling the apartheid accusation against Israel. But in 1976 Israelis were willing to ignore South African Premier John Vorster’s support for the Third Reich during World War II, which earned him imprisonment in Britain.

“It comes down to: Are you with the Russians or are you with the United States and the West?” asks former Defense Secretary William Cohen. The White House and some Republicans are criticizing Israel’s mixed signals on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The world is justly alarmed by the treatment of Ukrainian civilians under Russian occupation. It should also pay heed to the Palestinian experience of Israeli military occupation in Hebron, where schoolchildren are detained at checkpoints and stun grenades hurled at journalists. The Campaign to Defund Racism, a broad coalition of Palestinian organizations and international allies, has called for our international supporters to challenge the laws that allow charities to underwrite our dispossession and erasure.

Activists in British Columbia who have worked for years to have illegal Israeli settlement wines pulled off the shelves of publicly owned liquor stores were shocked when the government pulled Russian liquor products just two days after the invasion of Ukraine.

Asmaa Yassin wonders why Palestinian aspirations for freedom are not treated the same way as Ukrainian resistance to Russia by the international media. “It appears what really matters is the sides in the conflict: who is involved and with whom, rather than for what and why,” she writes. “The world’s attention is now vividly focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I am watching the news in Gaza speechless, boiling with rage.”

Brian J. Brown, a Methodist minister who was banned in his native South Africa in 1977 for anti-apartheid work, writes that apartheid in Israel/Palestine is in many ways more brutal than it was in his country, including checkpoints and barriers and expulsions. His new book says that recognition of that apartheid and total opposition to it is mandatory for any person or church that claims to follow Christian teachings.

Israel killed three Palestinians on Tuesday in two separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel since the start of this year to 15.

The possibility of the Iran nuclear deal being revived seems to have brightened in February 2022, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war may give it more urgency.

A young Palestinian girl was one of several Palestinians to be brutally assaulted by Israeli police forces in occupied East Jerusalem on Monday, as hundreds of Muslims gathered in the city to commemorate a religious occasion. Videos and photos flooded social media on Monday, showing armed Israeli forces brutalizing Palestinians outside the Damascus Gate area of the Old City in East Jerusalem.