The Mondoweiss holiday gift guide is here! From our favorite books, to dresses with hand-stitched embroidery, ethically produced Hanukkah candles, hand-crafted olive wood nativity sets, and of course Mondoweiss swag we’ve pulled together some of our favorites for your end of the year gift giving.
Donald Trump says his chief negotiator for Israel/Palestine, Jared Kushner, “loves” Israel but some American Jews don’t love Israel enough and Democratic radicals want to “bully” Israel. He spoke before largest donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson in Florida Saturday night at the Israeli American Council.
At 11:15 p.m. on Nov. 13, Hamoud Abu Amra got a call from Israeli security warning him to evacuate his house in Gaza, the Israeli army was about to bomb it. He lives 500 meters from the Israel border, and this has now happened to him four times. He vows to rebuild. A refugee from Dimona, nothing will make him leave his land.
At the same time as he reversed decades of US policy on settlements, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly reached out to Sheldon Adelson for donor support to run for Senate in Kansas. And it’s not a scandal. Though the Israel lobby corrupts our foreign policy.
The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights is the target of a $90 million lawsuit that accuses the group of engaging in environmental terrorism. “The lawsuit is a ludicrous abuse of U.S. courts to silence calls for Palestinian freedom,” says the Center for Constitutional Rights Deputy Legal Director Maria LaHood.
Raising a three-year-old can be challenging for any parent. But parenting in Palestine comes with its own set of obstacles that extend far beyond answering tough questions.
Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennet, of the ultra nationalist “New Right” party, said on Sunday that a new settlement would be built on top of Hebron’s once bustling fruit and vegetable market, now referred to by locals as a ghost town. “The American government gave the greenlight to the Israelis to build settlements without consequence,” Mufeed al-Sharabati tells Mondoweiss.
The catastrophic climate crisis is fueled by global inequality and engineered by complicit governments and corporations that put profit before people and planet. Everywhere, the least powerful are the most affected. Indigenous Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and apartheid, with no control over their land or natural resources, are highly vulnerable to the climate crisis.
Faced with claims that Labour antisemitism poses an existential threat to Jews, on the one side, and arguments that antisemitism is neither widespread nor institutionalised in the party, on the other, it might be tempting to split the difference and assume that the truth lies somewhere in between. But Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison say the truth of this controversy lies not in the middle but at one pole: there is no ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’.
The New York Times gives Paul Wolfowitz a platform to criticize Trump on the withdrawal from Syria, and the fight against ISIS, without saying a word about the roots of ISIS in the destruction that his project of invading Iraq wrought throughout the region. Wolfowitz should be on trial for major war crimes, Helena Cobban writes, not featured in the New York Times.
Research by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the U.K. reveals that British universities invest over £456 million in companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law. The research was published as hundreds of students across the country take action as part of ‘Apartheid Off Campus’ day of action, with banner drops and protests at campuses across the UK.
This week, the United Nations attempted to put a figure on exactly how much the occupation was costing the Palestinian economy. The number it arrived at — an estimated $48 billion between 2000 and 2017 — was larger than many expected.
Chief Rabbi Efraim Mirvis has no lessons to teach Corbyn or the Labour party about racism. In fact, it is his own, small-minded prejudice that blinds him to the anti-racist politics of the left. His ugly message is now being loudly amplified by a corporate media keen to use any weapon it can, antisemitism included, to keep Corbyn and the left out of power – and preserve a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
While electrical blackouts are common across the West Bank, scheduled outages are due to continue as the Palestinian power distributor has not paid overdue bills from the Israeli energy provider since 2014.
For Christian Zionists, the settlements have never been illegal because God’s law supersedes international law—and now, it seems, so do the laws of Israel and the United States.
“I am convinced that the loss of legitimacy of the Zionist idea, of the idea of a special state for a special people, is irreversible, that that cannot be resurrected in the 21st century, a time when we at least preach if not practice universal rights and equality,” the writer Ali Abunimah said in a landmark speech ten years ago, and his remarks have proved to be prophetic in describing the anti-Zionist movement inside progressive life.
Karam Qawasmi, a Palestinian man who was recorded last year in a shocking encounter where he was shot in the back while walking away from the camera with his arms stretched above his head, has come forward with new allegations of abuse surrounding the incident.
Israel would have reached a deal with the Palestinians and allowed a Palestinian state years ago if it did not have blind American support to go on taking more and more Palestinian land. The Israel lobby, which has prevented criticism in both parties in the U.S., is the root cause of the conflict, and the lobby’s role as Israel’s supporter in western capitals is a fundamental principle of Zionism.
For all their talk of “complexity” and “ambiguity,” the contributors to “Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict” are in fact as politically and morally engaged as those putative classroom brainwashers and ideologues who serve as their whipping-boys. Instead of being more scrupulous and balanced in their pedagogy, these authors simply have a particular historical and ethical “take” on the subject. The Zionist-Palestinian conflict is not so very morally or politically ambiguous.
The New York Times Jerusalem correspondent David Halbfinger hit a new low yesterday with his article contending that “a new group of Arab thinkers” want to abandon the boycott of Israel.
The same paper that dissects every bigoted innuendo by Donald Trump somehow loses that ability when it comes to the political leaders of Israel.
Sophia Armen responds to the passage of U.S. resolution HR 296, which recognized the Armenian Genocide, and describes the challenges Armenians face in their struggle for justice. “Our physical erasure from our homeland, is mirrored in discourse,” Armen writes.
Western media has rationalized the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza by focusing on on Israel’s fears. Denijal Jegic writes these “fears” are a reflection of the structure that underlies the relationship between the settler-colonial state and the indigenous population.
Gaza has always been the exception throughout history. Starting from mighty Samson, to the Intifadas, Gaza was always there, regardless of the challenges, leaving its own mark on history and reminding everyone it in no way could be bypassed.
Alice Rothchild grew up with a deep love for Israel, the redemptive, out-of the-ashes, kibbutz-loving, feisty little country that could do no wrong. Yet she writes, “it is often said, if we don’t know our history, we are destined and doomed to repeat it.”