Jerusalem has emerged as a second front in Israel’s counterinsurgency strategy, prompting Itamar Ben-Gvir to ramp up the Israeli state’s never-ending war on the city and its people.

Two years ago, Israeli soldiers in the West Bank shot Harun Abu Aram as he protected his family’s generator. This week Harun died from his injuries, a great martyr to the cause of Palestinian steadfastness.

Events in Jerusalem over the past few days show that Ben Gvir’s declared war on East Jerusalem has already begun, as Israeli authorities crack down on Palestinians across the city.

In yet another demonstration of the bankruptcy of Biden’s policy on Palestine, the State Department called a UN Security Council resolution opposing Israel’s latest settlement move as “unhelpful,” a sure sign the U.S. will veto it. And reinforcing Biden’s bankruptcy is the emergence of a new Democratic Party PAC funded by Jeffrey Yass, who has funded Trump Republicans, to bolster the rightwing settler agenda here in the U.S.

Vera Tamari’s intimate story of her family’s life before 1948 allows us to dream of how life might have been in Palestine if the Nakba had never happened.

An Israeli government body that represents 72,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has published a map of its jurisdiction that shows only Jewish settlements– simply removing scores of Palestinian villages and the cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh. The map was published by the Binyamin Regional Council on a webpage titled “Build Your Future With Us” that is designed to attract American Jews to move to “northern Jerusalem suburbs.”

In the aftermath of the Gilboa Prison break, Palestinian prisoners have faced harsh punitive measures by the Israeli Prison Service. They are now fighting back as the Gilboa escapees stand trial.

The State Department was asked multiple times whether or not the Biden administration was prepared to do anything to impede Israel’s new West Bank settlement plans– legalizing Jewish outposts– beyond the customary condemnations. Ned Price’s answer was “No,” but he used many words to get there.

Israel is putting its commitment to Jewish supremacy above the functioning of its healthcare system, proposing rejecting graduates of Palestinian universities in favor of “Jewish purity.”

My friend the late writer Yossi Gurvitz was an apikoros in the best sense of the word, the Jewish term for a freethinker. His heresy led him to support BDS. Educated in yeshivas, he broke out as a teen when he discovered Plutarch, reading real not bible history. That independence led him in time to become “Israel’s first serious anti-occupation blogger” and to point out the vicious ethnocentrism in the basement of Jewish religiosity that Israel was awakening– “and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16.”