David Lloyd says that the outrage that has greeted University of Michigan’s John Cheney-Lippold refusal to write a letter of reference for a student who wished to participate in a Study Abroad Program in Israel is astonishingly hypocritical. “No professor and no institution should engage in furthering programs that so systematically violate our long-cherished equal-opportunity and anti-discrimination policies, inscribed both in federal law and campus codes. US academics should do the right thing by following Professor Cheney-Lippold’s courageous example and refusing to participate in any institutional endorsement of study abroad in Israel,” Lloyd writes.

Frank Sinatra got $2 million in 1981 to defy boycott calls and play South African apartheid venue Sun City. Lana Del Rey just heeded boycott calls, giving up a $700,000 appearance fee, nearly 10 times her usual reported fee, and canceled Israel’s “escapist” Meteor festival. See the parallel?

Itay Tiran, a top Israeli actor who is leaving for Germany, gives an interview to Haaretz where he endorses BDS and says that Zionism equals racism. He sounds free as a bird, and the interview is liberating for others.

Andrew Gillum, the progressive star who is running to be Florida governor, supports McCarthyite legislation to restrict BDS. Ayanna Pressley, a MA progressive running for congress, also disappoints. But there’s good news too: the New York Times and NPR have both run stories with positive references to the movement for equal rights.

Lana Del Rey is one of many artists who recently canceled their performance at the upcoming Meteor Festival in Israel. Natasha Rappezzo writes, “If Lana Del Rey chose to perform at the Meteor Festival, she would have been using her name and influence to whitewash Israeli crimes. As a fan, I am happy that one of my favorite artists has grown and will stand on the side of justice. As a supporter of Palestinian human rights and freedom, it has been incredible to watch Palestinians and the international community rise to action and deliver this win for the movement.”

Scientists from around the world write an open letter deploring a particle physics conference being held at Ariel University, an academic institution located in an Israeli settlement deep in the West Bank. Attending the conference “amounts to accepting the Israeli government’s policy of gradually annexing the occupied territories to Israel,” they say.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, says that even after being bought by PepsiCo, Sodastream should still be boycotted: “SodaStream is still subject to boycott by the global, Palestinian-led BDS movement for Palestinian rights. Its new factory is actively complicit in Israel’s policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev). SodaStream’s mistreatment of and discrimination against Palestinian workers is not forgotten either.”

Nathan Thrall’s long read in the Guardian on the origins of the BDS movement: “The nonviolent activism of the second intifada was a prelude to what would become a worldwide boycott campaign.”

Larry Commodore, a First Nations activist aboard the al-Awda boat to Gaza, speaks to Kim Jensen about the sing-a-longs on the Freedom Flotilla, his treatment once detained in Israel, and how he fell into activism to support Palestinians.

The extreme character of Israel’s nation-state law and its Gaza massacre provides a golden opportunity to activists to mobilize wider and deeper support for the Palestinian struggle, Richard Falk reports from a conference in Beirut.