The news invariably invokes “Hamas” and “rockets” to explain the Israeli siege and massacres. No: Although Israel heightened its blockade after the rise of Hamas, the siege began in 1948 and has continued unabated since. Many of the people Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948 ended up in Gaza, facing starvation, cold, and disease in the suddenly overpopulated land.
According to the new Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, hostility to Israel “…could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the State.” This, the sole appearance of the word “emotion” in the entire document, is applied exclusively to the direct victims of Israeli crimes, the very people who have the most fact-based, lived-experience for entirely rational “hostility” to the state. Categorizing the Palestinian response as emotional is to deny Palestinians the dignity to simply demand to be free of their shackles.
Edward Sutherland, “Principal Teacher” of religious education at the Belmont Academy in Ayr, Scotland, and a senior figure in the Confederation of Friends of Israel in Scotland (COFIS), has been accused of using a pseudonym to post antisemitic material in what appears to have been an attempt to smear the pro-Palestinian movement in general, and the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) in particular.
Suhail Khoury, director of Palestine’s Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, and his wife, Rania Elias, director of Jerusalem’s Yabous Cultural Centre, were taken by Israeli authorities from their home in the Beit Hanina area of occupied East Jerusalem on July 22 and held and interrrogated that day. Israel is “using brute force to extinguish cultural life,” says a former colleague of Khoury’s.
100 years ago today, one British officer turned Palestine over to another British officer with a jesting receipt, “One Palestine, complete” –among the most often quoted Zionist documents. Their joke is still galling 100 years later in the history of colonialism.
British filmmaker Ken Loach is compelled to withdraw from an anti-racism charity event because pro-Israel activists target him for his support of BDS. The price for keeping Loach would be “to wreck not only the competition and Ken Loach’s reputation, but the charity’s very existence,” his supporters said.
Bret Stephens’s opinion of the Trump “peace plan” for Palestine is titled “Every Time Palestinians Say ‘No,’ They Lose”, and is premised on racist invention, beginning with its history lesson on why Palestinians “lose when they say ‘no’.”
In the wake of Boris Johnson overwhelming victory in UK elections, Lord John Mann, the government’s independent antisemitism adviser, announced “I will be instigating an investigation this January into the role of the Canary and other websites in the growth of antisemitism in the United Kingdom.”
Trump’s acceptance of the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank actually hastens the end of Zionism’s discriminatory ideology. What had always been the reality will be on full display for the world to see: Israel is an apartheid state. And the call for simply equality will be Israel’s ultimate defeat.
