The Israeli government said it would meet Gaza protesters from the “Great March of Return” with live fire across the border fence and it has followed through today, killing at least 12 Palestinians, according to early reports. The number keeps climbing. The first to be killed was a Palestinian farmer, said to be working his fields.
Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem continues to resonate. One response is a new video of a Mahmoud Darwish poem as read by Roger Waters, with orchestration by Le Trio Joubran, a band of three Palestinian brothers, two of whom play oud. The piece is titled “Supremacy.”
The press is reporting that Jared Kushner’s days as a White House power may come to an end, due to a flurry of reports about his meetings as a Trump adviser with foreign officials and corporate execs who are in a position to help out his family’s troubled real estate company — as well as Kushner’s considerable innocence when it comes to foreign policy. The knives are out, and the latest reports are that Donald Trump himself wants his son-in-law to disappear.
It is “shameful” and “unacceptable,” that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a book store, Book Culture, was coerced into signing a political statement opposing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) targeting Israel in order to participate in a bookfair at a leading synagogue. More than 40 Jews, including Peter Beinart, Dorothy Zellner and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, write that “a cloud hangs over our neighborhood.”
On the February 5th, the Israeli High Court of Justice decided that seven structures in the village of Susiya, in the south Hebron Hills of the occupied West Bank, could be demolished by Israel without delay. These seven structures are home to 42 residents of the village, of which half are children. Susiya has become an international symbol of Palestinian villages resistance against displacement, and the villagers say more international solidarity is needed to prevent these demolitions.
Late last year the Pew Center published a report that confirmed anecdotal data, and plain common sense: hate crimes against Muslims are up. Current rates dwarf the national spike that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks. The culprit for such a dramatic increase is no surprise. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president ushered in a wave of racism against Muslims, among others. To combat the challenges of the political moment, activists Elly Bulkin and Donna Nevel have launched a new campaign: Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism.
Psychiatrist Samah Jabr and three US mental health clinicians called on the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) to reconsider its decision to hold its 2019 international meeting in Israel because the state is “perpetrating massive injury to the Palestinian people, through its relentless assault on the minds and bodies of its individuals and its remorseless ambition to annihilate Palestinian history, culture, economy, artifacts, architecture, and community life.”
Mohammad Saba’aneh shares Christmas cartoons from Palestine.
Today the arrest of Ahed Tamimi, 16, in occupied Nabi Saleh early Tuesday morning, after a video surfaced showing her slapping an Israeli soldier, is gaining global attention, including from the Washington Post. The malignant piece in the Post quotes Israelis calling her “Shirley Temper,” as if Ahed chose to be in an occupied besieged village as a career move at age 10.
President Donald Trump will make a statement at 1:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern time where he most likely will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, despite much international condemnation.