The Anti-Israel Boycott Act was challenged repeatedly at Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s Town Hall in the Bronx on Saturday July 22. Gillibrand promised to take another look at the bill, said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no vision for peace, and acknowledged that AIPAC has a stranglehold on Congress.

Westchester County legislative committee passes a resolution describing BDS as a campaign to “malign the Jewish people,” by a 12-1 vote despite efforts of human rights activists. Sole holdout is Alfreda Williams. “It’s a lost cause, perhaps, but in my experience, most good causes begin as lost,” writes Priscilla Read.

“One has to be brave to participate in non-violent dissent, and unfortunately there are many more decent than brave people,” says Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard. “Israeli politicians are afraid,” and there have been a “tsunami of bills to close the democratic space available to us.”

One-state Greater Israel is not consonant with democratic ideals, and Americans and the world will never accept it, John Kerry said. The unspoken challenge to Jews the world over was, will the Jewish people accept it?

Rejecting the two-state solution was seen as repudiation of Zionism and the destruction of the concept of a Jewish state, so unthinkable that in many venues, no serious discussion of a one-state solution was tolerated. That era is over. Let us imagine a state where one person equals one vote.

Two dioceses of the Lutheran Church of Sweden sponsored a Kairos Palestine summer camp to consider ramping up the pressure on Israel by increasing support of the BDS movement. “We have waited 41 years” as the situation has gotten worse and worse in Israel and the Occupied Territories, said Rev. Anna Karin Hammar. “We are cowards.”

Want to know what it means for any human being to live under occupation? In The Way to the Spring, Ben Ehrenreich gives an education that will sicken you, of “the almost infinitely complex system of control that Israel exercised over Palestinians throughout the West Bank,” and of the terrible losses it imposes on those who struggle to resist it.

A consortium of pro-Israel groups hold a conference at SUNY Purchase to explore “anti-semitism on campus,” but smearing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and saying there has never been a Palestine is not the way to win the hearts of young Jews.