Two Israelis and one Palestinian are on trial for counts of trespassing and assault for disrupting an event with Knesset member Aliza Lavie who spoke at Humboldt University in Berlin in June 2017.
Madonna tried to offset criticism of her participation in the Eurovision song contest by incorporating a Palestinian flag into her final performance. “The most meaningful expression of solidarity is to cancel performances in apartheid Israel,” the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel responded in a statement.
On Wednesday, Republicans in the House of Representatives initiated a rarely-used legislative procedure to try to force a vote on a controversial bill that encourages states and localities to penalize individuals, nonprofit organizations, and companies that boycott for Palestinian rights. This is the latest GOP move in an ongoing, concerted effort to to portray themselves as the saviors of Israel and the Jewish people and paint the Democrats as an anti-Semitic, BDS-loving, radical left horde. And Democrats seem to be falling into the trap.
Nada Elia writes on Nakba Day 2019: “This year, to honor all that has been lost, and ensure we can move forward, we must pressure our politicians to address the Nakba from the river to the sea. Let us then seize the moment to demand that our progressive politicians abandon their mindless platitudes about the two-state delusion, and ask them to choose instead: justice, or apartheid.”
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is taking place in Tel Aviv. The popular music event could be a great propaganda opportunity for Europe’s last colony. But government-funded Hasbara continues to recycle the same colonial myths, trying to conceal settler-colonial inscription and indigenous erasure behind colorful pictures of sun, sea, rainbow flags, and shawarma.
Queer activists in London released a spoof version of YMCA to urge BBC host Graham Norton to boycott Eurovision, because of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Leila White from London Palestine Action says, “Graham Norton should listen to Palestinians and heed their call for a boycott of Israel until it stops its systematic denial of Palestinians rights. We say no to pinkwashing, yes to BDS!”
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki has urged European nations to sanction Israel for illegally grabbing Palestinian land, saying the US Trump administration’s expected peace plan will do nothing to bring about Middle East peace. “They have to start thinking about sanctions, boycotting, Israeli policies, actions, the relationship, review their strategic bilateral relations with Israel — as [the] European Union and as individual countries,” al-Maliki told Mondoweiss.
Cultural workers in Gaza call on the world to boycott the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Tel Aviv, and announce the creation of the Gazavision festival: “Even when Israel bombs us, imprisons our men, women and children, kills and maims thousands of Palestinian protesters on the Great Return March and does everything to silence our voices, we will continue to sing.”
Citing faculty and students who were denied entry into Israel, New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis passes a resolution that pledges non-cooperation with the university’s study abroad program in Tel Aviv.
BDS South Africa board member Tisetso Magama writes: “South African workers, across all sectors, are becoming flag-bearers of the BDS and Palestine solidarity movement with unionists insisting that workplaces must become Apartheid Israel Free Zones. The Palestinian BDS campaign against Israel, inspired by our own successful isolation of Apartheid South Africa, is moving at a far faster pace than the boycott of Apartheid South Africa did. This is partially because the Israeli regime of Apartheid and oppression against the Palestinians, as our former President Kgalema Mothlante, has put it, ‘is far worse that what we Black South Africans experienced.'”