Haaretz reports: “Israel says the migrants have 60 days to accept the offer to leave the country for an unnamed African destination in exchange for $3,500 and a plane ticket. Those who don’t by April 1 will be incarcerated indefinitely.”
The Israeli Knesset voted earlier this month to amend the penal code in order to remove restriction on judges issuing the death penalty for those involved in murders while carrying out “terrorist operations.” The bill has not been adopted yet. From the monthly report on Palestinian health and human rights from Jewish Voice for Peace.
Kadima, the Seattle Reconstructionist Jewish community, gave an award to a grassroots immigrants’ rights group, the Northwest Detention Center Resistance/Resistencia al NWDC, which focuses on a federal detention center in Tacoma, after the Jewish Federations of Seattle chose to honor the police department, despite its record of excessive force.
When journalists ask, Will Palestinians turn to violence? they express the belief that Israelis are peaceful. And they ignore the fact that the occupation in many dimensions is a form of violence: functionally, institutionally, politically, emotionally.
Alice Rothchild attended a benefit dinner for the Institute for Middle East Understanding and found it to be a fundraiser, a celebration, a showcase of the active, committed Palestinian community, and also a uniquely Yom Kippur moment. She writes it was an opportunity “to join the celebration of a movement of creative, thoughtful, very visible Palestinians who are building their own powerful voice in U.S. society, linking arms with others in the struggle for justice.”
During the high holidays, Jews must consider the nature of the state that claims to speak in their name: Political Zionism in practice in Israel has produced a settler colonial state founded on the basis of establishing an Arab free state, where Jewish trauma, aspirations, and history are privileged at the expense of everyone else and this continues to this moment.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is a co-sponsor of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act that the Israel lobby has pushed in Congress, and she claims to be a supporter of human rights and free speech. Several of her constituents meet with a Cantwell staffer to explain that the boycott movement is trying to free Palestinians living under occupation and is not anti-Semitic.
In the 1950s Israel used a savage treatment for ringworm on immigrant Mizrahi children: approximately 100,000 Jewish immigrant children from Arab countries were taken from their parents and without parental consent, their heads were shaved, their hair was plucked, they were placed on a table, sometimes in restraints, and given radiation doses. The case is reminiscent of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Alice Rothchild is invited to give a talk about Israel/Palestine to a New England private school, then disinvited after the administrators view her PowerPoint presentation. A dismayed Rothchild writes, “The tragedy for me is that first there is this framing that there are ‘two sides’ when there are actually many sides, this being a complicated historical time, and that anyone who says, let’s step back and look at the forces of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, explore the narrative of Palestinians, question the framing and dominant paradigms of the Israeli government, AIPAC, Christian Zionism, this person (who is often me) is immediately perceived as causing conflict or needing to be balanced by the ‘other side’.”
What the mainstream press leaves out: January 8 killings of four soldiers in Jerusalem were likely result of a young Palestinian man losing all hope as well as the ability to cope in an increasingly oppressive situation, targeting the people who have made his life a misery, writes Alice Rothchild.