It has been very hard to understands what Airbnb’s actual policy concerning illegal Israeli settlement listings is. A statement in Hebrew was issued saying it halted the ban policy, and was later contradicted by another saying it had not changed, and that this is all “incredibly complex and emotional.”
Last week, the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung reported that Israel asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to stop funding the Jewish Museum in Berlin, among other institutions. The reason behind the demand: the museum’s exhibition on Jerusalem “presents a Muslim-Palestinian perspective of the city.”
The liberal-Zionist organization Commanders for Israel’s Security has a new campaign calling on Israel to “divorce” the Palestinians, as a response to growing calls from the right to annex parts of the West Bank. Jonathan Ofir writes that the struggles between right and left Zionism have always historically been not about a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but about the speed at which Israeli expansionism needs to happen. While the Commanders for Israel’s Security are warning about the dire consequences of annexation, Israel is engaged in ongoing slow-motion ethnic cleansing that the group approves of, and is accomplishing similar goals.
The Hanukkah story is also a religious-political one from its beginnings – and it still is. It poses the question of how we view religious fundamentalism and separation of church and state. We need no more proof than Sheldon Adelson’s aptly named Campus Maccabees crusading against the BDS movement by way of free trips to Israel.
CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill was fired last week after he advocated Palestinian rights “from the river to the sea”. Of course that has been Israeli policy from the days of Ben-Gurion, in defiance of the indigenous population, and no one advocating Israeli sovereignty in those boundaries ever loses their job, Jonathan Ofir explains.
Airbnb’s decision to pull listings in Israeli settlements has shed light on another service that offers listing in illegal colonies in the West Bank – Booking.com, which does not seem inclined to act similarly. It seeks to avoid a storm, which is surely coming anyway.
Airbnb’s pulling of listings in Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank is highly selective. But Israeli leaders are viewing it as a total attack on Israel, and have plans to punish Airbnb. They are making the case for a comprehensive boycott of Israel as a whole, per the BDS campaign; for the government is utterly dedicated to the settlement enterprise.
In a first, US Ambassador to UN Nikki Haley declared that she would vote against a resolution condemning Israel’s control of Syrian Golan since 1967. Israel took the land for strict reasons of greed, as then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan conceded, though the illegal occupation is rarely mentioned in the US press.
A lot of drama is ostensibly playing out in Israel – Defense Minister Lieberman resigned because he opposed a ceasefire and being soft on Hamas. But this drama is more about politics than actual security – it is about Israel’s upcoming elections
Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statement, “Empires have conquered and replaced entire populations and no one is talking about it,” is yet another fascistic justification for ethnic cleansing from Israeli leaders. It goes back a long ways, and it has support from the worst regimes in the world.