I’m hopeful that this is too big a moment for some westerners to turn back to complicit persecution. I’m hopeful that the long Palestinian spirit of sumud, or steadfastness, is an infectious spirit.
MSNBC’s decision to cancel Mehdi Hasan’s show has drawn backlash from Palestine advocates
Despite near unanimity of support for Israel in the US political establishment these days, some voices are making it into the mainstream media to explain the causes of violence and state that while they condemn the Hamas attacks on civilians, they were not “unprovoked.”
Mainstream media are at last humanizing Palestinians with great potential political consequences. Ali Velshi of MSNBC met the Palestinian activist Hajj Suleiman in 2019 and when Israel killed him last week, Velshi honored his resistance with a searing report describing an Israeli occupation of nearly 700,000 illegal settlers encroaching on traditional villages and destroying their bread ovens.
Enabled by Human Rights Watch’s April finding, mainstream media figures are coming out and saying that Israel practices apartheid– lately Ali Velshi, John Oliver explain the Gaza onslaught by saying the a-word. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also said “Apartheid states are not democracies” over the weekend.