With its new nation-state of the Jewish people law, Israel is now officially an apartheid state, with secondary rights for non-Jews. Liberal Zionists who have said they only boycott the occupation but not Israel are now challenged by this law to take action against discrimination inside the state of Israel (which the BDS boycott program has long targeted).

Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman’s refusal to accept an award at a ceremony in Israel because of “extremely distressing” recent events is causing a huge headache for Israel advocates. The correct response comes from Benjamin Netanyahu, Bret Stephens and Avi Mayer: avoid the topic.

The New York Times has published an exhaustive front-page article about Gaza’s misery that is a manifesto from Hasbara Central– the Israeli propaganda arm– explaining the worsening tragedy as the product of Palestinian infighting. An Israeli general is quoted at length by reporter David Halbfinger, U.N. and human rights officials not at all. Hamas is alleged to have started three wars, when Israel initiated them.

A theme of a New York Times article on the nomination of Kenneth Marcus to be civil rights director in the Education Department is that the BDS movement against Israel pits “Jews” on the nation’s campuses against “students of color.” But there are many Jews who support BDS, who are invisible here; while Zionism is conflated with Judaism.

Ahed Tamimi, 16, has been held in an Israeli prison for nearly a month since her arrest last December 19 for slapping a soldier. Today a military court in Ofer prison inside occupied territory extended her detention indefinitely, till she is tried. 

There are many parallels between Martin Luther King Jr’s call for “direct political action” leading to a crisis for the Jim Crow South, in his letter from Birmingham jail in 1963, and Ahed Tamimi’s courageous slap of a soldier after her cousin was maimed in occupied Nabi Saleh last month, leading to her imprisonment for nearly a month already.

Here we go again. The neoconservatives are on the march for a war with Iran, and Trump’s delivery on the Jerusalem promise, raises the fear that he may also attack Iran. A reported cabinet shuffle would elevate militarists Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton, giving power to the neocons, and even Bill Kristol has had a nice word for the president recently.

New York Times columnist David Brooks has never come clean for the time that his neoconservatism trumped any conservative notion of government action and he supported the Iraq war. Once again he offered an empty apology, “We went into Iraq because we thought it would help for democracy around the world, and we overstepped in that case.”

After Alan Dershowitz spoke at the University of California on “The Liberal Case for Israel,” a cartoon by Joel Mayorga appeared in the Daily Californian, savaging Dershowitz’s claim by showing his hand dripping blood from a corpse. The school’s chancellor said the cartoon was anti-Semitic and the newspaper retracted the image. Does any of this really matter?