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.
Israel deceives international media about ground attack on Gaza in order to gain a tactical edge. But the news is Israel will continue its indiscriminate air war against Gaza, killing scores of civilians, including children, because it won’t jeopardize the safety of its own soldiers.
The US press is finally making room for Palestinian voices, with a stunning op-ed by Refaat Alareer in the NYT about how it feels to be pounded by missiles in Gaza. And Rula Jebreal tells MSNBC that Palestinians inside Israel experience “Trumpism on steroids.” But Israel supporters fight back, with Bari Weiss saying that killing innocent children is the price of having a state.
Joe Biden helped Bush and Cheney build the case for the Iraq war by allowing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be a doormat. Scott Horton’s book “Enough Already” reminds us that lies and conspiracy theories by Israel supporters fed the runup to the Iraq war. That record is required reading now that our supposed client state is escalating its attacks on Iran just as the U.S. is trying to reenter the Iran deal.
Why does Biden exasperate the left by defending Israel’s strikes on apartment houses in Gaza? Because he is dependent on the Israel lobby for Democratic Party campaign support. As Pew’s latest survey shows, Jews care a lot about Israel, Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats, and Jews make more money than other Americans on average.
The New York Times’s Mideast expert Thomas Friedman blames the Palestinian uprising on Tik-Tok vidoes rather than on the racist landgrabs by Israel that Palestinians have resisted for decades and that are at the heart of the Human Rights Watch report that the New York Times is determined to flush down the memory hole.
The era of Israeli impunity in U.S. politics may finally be ending, as Sen. Van Hollen praises UN report on Palestine and Rep. Watson Coleman calls for Israeli “accountability.” And a report on a tense call between a top Biden aide and his Israeli counterpart left Israelis fulminating that the U.S. should “stay out” of the Jerusalem crisis.
The erasure of Palestinian life has been ongoing since the start of the Nakba in 1948. This erasure is material — massacre-propelled ethnic cleansing — but it is also narrative.
US media bury the truth of Palestinian protests in Jerusalem: Israeli leaders aim to seize homes in Sheikh Jarrah in a naked colonization strategy: “the way to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people,” as one apartheid advocate who happens to be the deputy mayor of Jerusalem told the New York Times.
As U.S. State Department calls on Palestine and Israel to “deescalate” tensions in Jerusalem, the US progressive movement and several politicians blame Israel for the violence.