Jonathan Ofir compares Donald Trump’s weak and vague statement on the Charlottesville white supremacist attack with his earlier failure to address a specific question on anti-Semitism. Fir says Trump doesn’t notice bigotry because he fosters it.

Yossi Gurvitz wrote that when American Jews seek to influence Israel as Jews they are reinforcing the illiberal ethnocratic nature of the state. Jonathan Ofir disagrees and says it is possible to engage with Israel as both Jewish and a liberal.

Many have appraised Israel’s 1967 occupation as ‘Apartheid’. But it goes beyond 1967, and beyond Apartheid, to genocidal actions over 7 decades of the state’s existence. The actions are so egregious that many can hardly fathom them, and so they recoil to an apologetics that amounts to: “Don’t exaggerate.”

The EU embassy in Tel Aviv has launched a campaign to up its image and employs an outspoken advocate for genocide of Palestinians. Avishai Ivri, a well known rightwing pundit, has celebrated the spraypainted slogan “Death to Arabs” and said Israel should kill 5000 Palestinians for every Israeli killed.

A poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute shows that 2 out of 3 Jewish Israelis support the death sentence for Palestinian attackers, considered “terrorists,” even if they attack armed occupation soldiers. Israel has not officially used the death penalty since Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962. Jonathan Ofir writes, “The potential enactment of the death penalty, especially in the case of Palestinian attackers, would be a grave matter, in view of the Israeli definitions of ‘terror’.”

The Israeli Supreme Court backed the state in only permitting Gazan music students to take part in the Jordanian part of a workshop and concerts – not the part in Ramallah. And it piously intoned, “[M]usical development…is not necessarily bound by location”.

Wednesday morning, Ariel Gold was broadcasting a live feed through her Facebook, in the midst of an assault on her by settlers in Al-Khalil (Hebron). It’s another glimpse into the reality wherein the settlers essentially run the game, and the soldiers are only there to protect them, and no one else – certainly not anyone who is not “standing with the Jews”, as it were, even if they are Jewish.

Likud minister Tzachi Hanegbi says that Palestinian protests may lead to their “third Nakba,” referring to the Israeli displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people which began with the founding of state in 1948. “This is how a Nakba starts,” Hanegbi said. “I pray that they do not bring a third Nakba on themselves.”

Palestinian violence outside Al-Aqsa mosque justifies the Israeli restrictions on the site, in the eyes of Israelis. But Al Aqsa is a Muslim compound, and the greater paradigm is that of Israeli state criminality and occupation, beginning with the ethnic cleansing of the Mughrabi quarter in 1967.

Last Monday, Senate minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is also a major supporter of the anti-BDS legislation, diverted from his Senate speech on health care, to address anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and BDS. He equated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions with anti-Semitism.