Israeli centrist Yair Lapid will forswear an alliance with Palestinian political parties if he gets the nod to form the next government. Instead he will court a rightwing religious Jewish party.

Benjamin Netanyahu is more desperate than ever. Will he provoke conflict to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal?

Tom Friedman says that Israel and the US are in the same boat, trying to build “pluralistic.. idealistic” societies. This is a rhetorical strategy to suppress the apartheid charge against Israel from a leading human rights group. And Friedman has freely acknowledged that his job entails promoting Israel. “Israel had me at hello,” he has said.

Even as Israel attacked an Iranian cargo ship in the Red Sea, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu used a speech at the Israeli Holocaust memorial to warn the world that a deal with Iran was “useless,” akin to making a deal with Nazis, and that Israel would take into its own hands its security against the “existential” threat that he claims Iran poses.

A bracing interview with former JVP deputy director Alissa Wise shows, When you are Jewish and come out as an anti-Zionist, you get excommunicated. That is how the Jewish community works to support Israel. If you persist in supporting Palestinians, forget about your community, because Jewish life as we know it is committed to supporting Israel, the miraculous achievement of the Jewish people in the 20th century in the wake of the extermination.

An AIPAC letter aimed at keeping Biden from returning to the Iran deal got only 43 signatures, which shows that Biden has the political capital he needs to reenter the deal. But he has shown a timidity, born of attacks by the rightwing Israel lobby, and won’t even lift sanctions for humanitarian purposes related to the pandemic, as he urged Donald Trump to do a year ago.

Use of the term “Israel Palestine conflict” may fall short of “settler colonialism” and “sociocide,” but it can open the door to the very conversation we need to have with people new to the issue. Asking “Who are the sides”  allows us to talk about the context and intent of Zionism, and the way it disregarded the rights of Palestinian communities residing in  the lands it craved. It also allows us to talk about the sadly neglected topic of Palestinian resistance and steadfastness, or sumud.

Nathan Thrall tells the story of the death of Milad Salama in occupied territory in 2012 to illuminate one lesson: Palestinian lives are all but disposable in the Zionist vision of settling the land. The “New York Review of Books” article contrasts Milad’s misfortune to be born in a bantustan to the good luck of Thrall’s own daughter– “a Jewish girl living a life of privilege on the other side of the wall.”

The Daily Kos censored a post by Muslim DNC delegates opposing a role for Susan Rice in the Biden cabinet after the website was pressured by Biden allies in the Democratic Party.

The last polls before March 23 election show Netanyahu with commanding position. 45 percent of voters think he is the best candidate for prime minister, nearly double the number of the hope of American liberal Zionists, centrist Yair Lapid. And Likud polls at 20 seats, way out ahead of Lapid’s party at 18.