Vermont-based farmworker rights organization Migrant Justice rejects a donation of hand sanitizer from the Israeli Consulate: “We will not be a party to your government’s attempted ‘sanitization’ of oppression.”
The murder by Israeli soldiers of Ali Abu Alia was the 6th killing of a Palestinian child in the occupied West Bank this year. And though Israeli soldiers have killed 155 children in West Bank in recent years, they have had near complete impunity– a process “unworthy of a country that proclaims it lives by rule of law,” the U.N. says. And liberal Zionist organizations maintain that impunity by insisting Israel keep getting U.S. military aid.
This year has been a slog, but from the Squad to BDS victories there have also been things to celebrate in 2020.
Michael Arria interviews Sumaya Awad and brian bean, editors of the new book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: “The Palestine movement doesn’t exist in isolation, so we need to stand up for it and integrate it into into our organizing for any system change to be possible in the U.S.”
German and Austrian cultural leaders are right to insist upon freedom of expression, but they should also actively extend their plea to embrace Palestinians.
Dave Reed talks with Olivia Katbi Smith, national U.S. organizer for the BDS Movement and co-chair of the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, about being the target of internet harassment, and Michael Arria interviews Palestine Legal’s Meera Shah about their new website that tracks anti-BDS legislation around the U.S.
More than 100 Palestinian and Arab academics challenge the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which they say “has been increasingly instrumentalized by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimize the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights.”
Pompeo’s gifts to Netanyahu in occupied territory yesterday were all about getting the Israel lobby on Pompeo’s side for 2024. The one headwind Pompeo has it in his power to possibly create against Biden/Harris in 2024 is to get Biden fighting with Netanyahu over settlements and get the Democratic Party fighting over Israel.
The BDS movement responds to the Trump Administration’s attacks: “With our many partners, we shall resist these McCarthyite attempts to intimidate and bully Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights defenders into accepting Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism as fate.”
Seven Brazilian filmmakers have pulled their films from TLVFest, the Israeli government-partnered LGBT film festival, running through November 21. The filmmakers, representing over half the Brazilian shorts at TLVFest, have requested their films be withdrawn from the program in response to the call from Palestinian queers.