There was a lot of news this week. Israel is accelerating its colonial project, from the West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon and Iran. The impunity Israel has enjoyed for decades is visibly crumbling. In the U.S. Senate, more than three-quarters of Democrats voted to block arms sales to Israel, a historic sea change in the decades-long bipartisan consensus. The American Jewish community is undergoing a generational break with Zionism that is reshaping the Israel lobby. The Iran war has produced no strategic victory for Israel or the United States, and Trump is now desperate for an exit. In Gaza and the West Bank, the daily reality of Israeli policy continues to grind down Palestinian life. Here are five key pieces we published, with more below.
Israel races to expand West Bank settlements before new regional realities set in — Qassam Muaddi
Israel is approving new West Bank settlements at an unprecedented rate, Qassam Muaddi reports. The window for unchecked land seizures is closing as Iran emerges intact from the war and U.S. politics shift. The goal now is to create facts on the ground that no future governments can reverse.
The Israel lobby is fracturing as young Jews abandon Zionism — Philip Weiss
Phil Weiss argues that a generational break is underway in the American Jewish community, and that the organized Israel lobby is fracturing as a result. Young Jews are leaving Zionist institutions in numbers those institutions cannot absorb, AIPAC has become a liability in Democratic primaries, and J Street is scrambling to hold a middle that no longer exists.
How Zionism’s anti-Jewish logic led Israel to bomb an Iranian synagogue — Jared Sacks
On April 7, during Passover, Israel bombed the Rafi-Nia synagogue in Tehran, home to a Jewish community that has lived in Iran for more than two thousand years and has long refused Israel’s pressure to emigrate. Jared Sacks argues that the attack exposes the anti-Jewish logic at the core of the Zionist project, which has always treated Jews outside its ideological frame as obstacles to be erased.
Israel’s long history of stoking sectarian tensions in Lebanon, and what it means for the ceasefire — Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau
Netanyahu may have been pushed by Trump into a ceasefire with Lebanon, but the Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau lays out why that won’t stop Israel from pursuing a well-worn playbook of exploiting sectarian divisions to weaken Lebanese resistance while entrenching its own expansion. The historical record here is crucial for understanding the current moment.
Congress must act to stop the Israeli war machine — Josh Ruebner
With two Senate resolutions on the floor this week, Josh Ruebner makes the case that Congress has the legal authority and the political opening to halt the delivery of the U.S. bombs and militarized bulldozers Israel has used to displace and kill Palestinians and Lebanese. The resolutions failed, but more than three-quarters of Senate Democrats voted yes, and the ground beneath U.S. military aid to Israel is shifting fast.
🇮🇷 The Iran war
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has produced no strategic victory and is fracturing the political coalitions that launched it. Trump is searching for an exit, but the conditions for an end to the violence remain out of reach as long as Israel continues to benefit from keeping the war going.
READ MORE → Trump may want out of the Iran war, but the first round of negotiations showed the challenges ahead — Mitchell Plitnick
READ MORE → Understanding the Iran war in the context of U.S. imperialism — Michael Arria
🇺🇸 U.S. politics and the Israel lobby
Democratic voters have decisively broken with their leadership on military aid, and the assumption that pro-Israel alignment is a political asset is unraveling.
READ MORE → The Shift: Senate Democrats’ vote to reject weapons for Israel reveals an out-of-touch party leadership — Michael Arria
READ MORE → In historic Senate vote, over 75% of Democrats vote to block arms sales to Israel — Michael Arria
READ MORE → Why Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary won’t impact European policy toward Israel — William Noah Glucroft
🇵🇸 Gaza and the West Bank
The systematic destruction of civil institutions and the ongoing blockade of basic aid are grinding down the conditions of Palestinian life in Gaza. Beyond the accelerated settlement construction, Israel continues to systematically suffocate Palestinian economic life across the West Bank.
READ MORE → No permit, no work, no future: inside the lives of West Bank workers crushed by Israel’s labor ban — Qassam Muaddi
READ MORE → When Israel destroyed Gaza’s courts, legal protections for women vanished — Shojaa Al-Safadi
READ MORE → Israel’s restriction of aid into Gaza leads to critical shortages in bread, baby formula, and water — Tareq S. Hajjaj
Future reading ( available towards the end of the month ):
“Israel: What Went Wrong?” by Omer Bartov.
Israel: What Went Wrong?: Bartov, Omer: 9780374618186: Amazon.com: Books
You may have heard Bartov’s name** – he is the “Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies” at Brown university. Last year he wrote the New York Times essay “Never Again – I’m A Genocide Scholar and I Know It when I See It”*** . From the Amazon review:
A leading Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust explores and explains his native country’s intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion….The distinguished historian Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country….In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov sketches the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens?
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Omer Bartov | History | Brown University
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Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. – The New York Times