Pro-Palestine and free speech activists who have been mobilizing against the Israel Anti-Boycott Act are sounding an alarm about rumors of a secret attempt this week to slip the legislation, which the ACLU has declared unconstitutional even in its revised form, into the must-pass House spending bill before the blue wave comes into power.

Gawker, the legendary blog that is shutting down today after nearly 14 years, was better known for covering New York’s power elite than for posts about Israel and Palestine. But the site, published some memorable, even brave, items about the Middle East.

Peter Beinart shows how Zionism puts Jews in a double bind: raised to oppose injustice but required to support Israel.

Legendary protest singer Phil Ochs, who died 40 years ago, updated “Love Me I’m A Liberal” in 1971 to call out “the arming of Israel.”

A NY Times report on Israeli reaction to a war crime was infuriatingly context free. Genius annotation gives media critics a new tool.

For a few magic weeks, Bernie Sanders was taken seriously as a presidential candidate with a chance to win – a huge watershed for a self-avowed socialist. But after falling short (even if slightly) in Iowa and Nevada, and with no friendly states on the horizon, Sanders is back in protest candidacy territory. Could taking on Hillary Clinton’s warlike foreign policy, which Sanders stubbornly refused to do, have changed the game?

Did the Hashomer Hatzair socialist Zionist youth movement that sent Bernie Sanders to Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim in 1963 form his views on Israel?

“We’re not going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem this morning,” WNYC public radio host Brian Lehrer told listeners Monday at the close of his all-Jewish discussion with NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren and Time columnist Joe Klein about the Netanyahu victory aftermath. They might have come a little closer if his guests had included a Palestinian instead of two Zionists. Klein called Netanyahu’s race-baiting Election Day speech “beyond tragic. It is shameful and embarrassing.” Unknowingly, he nails it. For liberal Zionists, it’s not the tragedy of generations of Palestinians exiled, slaughtered or marginalized because powerful outsiders claim their land—­it’s the shame and embarrassment of those who have to reconcile their support for all of that with their liberal self-image.

The Gaza war and collapse of the peace process destroyed liberal Zionists’ cherished vision of an egalitarian Jewish democracy, forcing many of Israel’s defenders to embrace the raw Islamophobia of ex-AP reporter Matti Friedman’s Tablet essay that blamed coverage of Operation Protective Edge in the media on ant-Semitism.