An Israeli government body that represents 72,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has published a map of its jurisdiction that shows only Jewish settlements– simply removing scores of Palestinian villages and the cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh. The map was published by the Binyamin Regional Council on a webpage titled “Build Your Future With Us” that is designed to attract American Jews to move to “northern Jerusalem suburbs.”

My friend the late writer Yossi Gurvitz was an apikoros in the best sense of the word, the Jewish term for a freethinker. His heresy led him to support BDS. Educated in yeshivas, he broke out as a teen when he discovered Plutarch, reading real not bible history. That independence led him in time to become “Israel’s first serious anti-occupation blogger” and to point out the vicious ethnocentrism in the basement of Jewish religiosity that Israel was awakening– “and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16.”

A new report from Americans for Justice in Palestine Action documents that the “rightwing Zionist” lobby spent $70 million in 2022 to knock off critics of Israel, and warn politicians “to not object to Israel’s crimes.” That big money explains why Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand gush over Benjamin Netanyahu in the runup to 2024 reelection campaigns.

The news from Palestine grows more worrying by the day, and liberal Zionists are in crisis. The bitter fruits of “Jewish democracy” are plainer than ever. The challenge is to recognize that there will never be safety until all people in the land feel secure.

Danny Ayalon, a vigorous advocate for Israel and former ambassador to the U.S., says he is worried about the growth of Jewish anti-Zionism in the United States.

One positive result of Israel’s rightward shift is that the U.S. discourse of the two-state solution appears to be cracking at last.

Just when you thought U.S. policy toward Palestinians could go no lower, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the region last week and offered “meaningless and empty gestures” about the violence being delivered to Palestinians while expressing great concern over the Netanyahu government’s plans to gut the powers of the Israeli judiciary.

Steve Inskeep of NPR today described Neve Yaakov, the scene of an attack last week, as being in Israel. While Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street called it a Jerusalem “neighborhood.” It is in fact an exclusively Jewish settlement in occupied Jerusalem, built on confiscated Palestinian lands, and a source of affliction for Palestinians.

Violence is erupting in Palestine now, and the bias with which it is being described in the west is as predictable as it is enraging.

When Israel killed ten Palestinians in Jenin in what is being called a “massacre,” those deaths were not a major story in the American press. But a day later, when a Palestinian gunman killed six Israeli settlers and a Ukrainian national in the illegal settlement of Neve Yaakov in occupied East Jerusalem, that was big news in the west– with outlets saying a terrorist had targeted a synagogue as if this is a religious conflict, and not militant apartheid.

Yesterday in a shocking exchange at the State Department, the spokesman for Biden’s foreign policy team refused to describe Palestinians in Jenin and other areas of the West Bank as living under military occupation by Israel.