This week, the major stories were the ceasefire in Gaza and the increasing crackdown on dissent over Israel in the United States. For the past several weeks, I’ve sent you a must-read article about developments in Palestine. This week, I sent you Michael Arria’s piece about recent examples where the media elite are leaning harder into their support for Zionism. Bari Weiss taking over the CBS News division is a blatant attempt to turn one of the oldest U.S. news outlets into a state-aligned propaganda machine, and we’re already seeing the results. However, as Michael catalogs, there are numerous other examples.
This is why independent media, like Mondoweiss, is so important. We’re not going to give Bari Weiss $150 million to publish some nonsense and call it news. Our entire annual budget is 1% of what the new billionaire owners of CBS paid Bari for her right-wing propaganda outlet. We are in the final half of our Fall Fundraising Campaign, and we need your support to keep publishing and grow our newsroom. Please make a donation today, and if you can, become a monthly supporter.
In Gaza, Tareq Hajjaj reports on Hamas security operations against armed gangs that worked with the Israeli army during the war. As I write this today, the Israeli military has launched a large wave of bombings across southern Gaza, in violation of the ceasefire. They claim Hamas fighters targeted Israeli troops, but without any evidence being presented. What they are not talking about is that the Israeli military is supporting and protecting violent gangs that have been stealing aid and collaborating with the Israelis during this brutal war. The Israeli government simply cannot be trusted. It is working to undermine the ceasefire and return to the slaughter it’s carried out for over two years. I don’t think Trump has the strength or clout to force Israel off this track, but we’ll see. He really wants that gold disk.
Qassam Muaddi wrote a piece about the 9,000 Palestinian captives still held by Israel, who face torture, hunger, and isolation in terrible conditions. He also published an article on how Western backing for a two-state formula served to preserve the Palestinian Authority, not create independence. As the consensus shifts, so do views about the future of the PA.
Our politics coverage examines what comes after the so-called peace process. Mitchell Plitnick argues that Democrats have one honest path after Trump’s flawed ceasefire plan: support Palestinian rights in clear terms. Anything less is just support for occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
Culture and movement work are outpacing politicians. William Johnson tracks thousands of film workers pledging to end complicity with the assault on Gaza. Irfan Kovankaya explains how activists in Türkiye face repression, despite leaders claiming to support them. As always, it is the people in the streets who force change.
We also published two fascinating pieces looking back in time. Sarah Prager tells how Catherine Hodes, once a teenage hostage of the PFLP, became an anti-Zionist activist. William Youmans marks forty years since the bombing that killed Palestinian American leader Alex Odeh. No one has been charged.
Must read: As support for Israel drops, the mainstream media is becoming even more Zionist
Michael Arria: Support for Israel is plummeting among the U.S. public, but Zionism dominates mainstream media more than ever. Several recent high-profile examples show the staggering disconnect between the media establishment and its viewers.
Genocide in Gaza
🇵🇸 Tareq Hajjaj: Hamas’s wide-ranging security campaign to eliminate armed gangs that collaborated with the Israeli army during the war is escalating. “Our operations will root them all out, without exception,” a Hamas security source tells Mondoweiss.
🚨 Qassam Muaddi: As world leaders celebrate the release of Israeli captives, over 9,000 Palestinian prisoners still face torture, hunger, and isolation behind bars. Half of them are held by Israel without charge or trial.
📰 Tareq Hajjaj: Beloved journalist Saleh Aljafarawi was murdered as chaos spread across Gaza following the ceasefire, and Hamas cracked down on Israel-backed armed clans and militias that looted aid during the war. Here’s how these stories are connected.
Catch-up
🇵🇸 Qassam Muaddi: Western support for a two-state solution was never intended to create Palestinian statehood — it was meant to justify the existence of the Palestinian Authority. Now that the Western consensus is shifting, so are thoughts about the need for the PA.
🫏 Mitchell Plitnick: Trump’s flawed ceasefire plan has opened a door for Democrats to amend their shameful failure to end the Gaza genocide. But it requires doing something few Democrats have been willing to do: support Palestinian rights.
📺 William Johnson: Despite repression and retaliation, the Gaza genocide has pushed an unprecedented wave of artists across the entertainment industry to back the cultural boycott of Israel.
🇹🇷 Irfan Kovankaya: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan often highlights his government’s support for the Palestinian people, but activists in the country face mounting repression for challenging Turkiye’s ongoing diplomatic, trade, and intelligence ties with Israel.
✊ Sarah Prager: Catherine Hodes was taken hostage by the PFLP at age 13 while traveling from Israel to the U.S. The experience sparked a lifelong commitment to Palestinian liberation.
⚖️ William Youmans: On October 11, 1985, Palestinian-American Alex Odeh was killed when a bomb destroyed his office. Despite suspicions that Jewish Defense League members carried out the attack, no charges have ever been filed. The unresolved case remains an open wound.
The title says “Gaza is still under fire”. It’s good to remember that the current situation didn’t start on Oct 7, 2023 – some old Mondoweiss articles are a reminder. From 2017:
Liberal Israeli leaders were contemplating genocide in Gaza already in 1967….
“Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.”…That is what Israeli Prime Minster Levi Eshkol said in 1967 about Gaza, as revealed in newly declassified documents from the time. Ofer Aderet of Haaretz reported about this today. …As is widely known, the standard UN definition of Genocide includes “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”….These newly declassified documents reveal that the genocidal policy was indeed there already in 1967. This is important, because it sheds light on later policies, such as Israel’s siege of Gaza, which is part of an ‘incremental genocide,’ as historian Ilan Pappe has been calling it since 2006, and it puts the notion of a “huge concentration camp”, the term Haaretz journalist Amira Hass has used for Gaza, in historical perspective. …Indeed, Eshkol was aware in the months after the 1967 war of the “suffocation and imprisonment” in Gaza in 1967, as the declassified documents reveal. And he was quite clear about this being an instrument to effect Israeli strategy: “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip”, he said.
https://mondoweiss.net/2017/11/liberal-contemplating-genocide/