New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art’s legendary Biennial exhibit is taking place, but the Whitney has a problem. Warren B. Kanders, the vice chairmen of the board of trustees, has amassed a $700 million fortune selling law enforcement gear and tear gas that has been used against unarmed civilians in Ferguson, Baltimore, Standing Rock, Puerto Rico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and in Israel/Palestine. Calls for the war profiteer’s resignation are growing louder by the day.
Palestinian artists held a concert in a building destroyed by Israel just a week ago to call on the world to boycott the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Tel Aviv. “Why doesn’t Eurovision arrange an event to let the music of dead, bombed-out buildings, and for the voices of mothers of the slain to be heard?” asked Sabreen Juma’a al-Najjar, the mother of slain paramedic Razan Al-Najjar, who attended the concert.
After a months long battle, a Texas school teacher was told she could return back to work after a federal court blocked an anti-BDS law in the state on the grounds that it was “likely unconstitutional.”
Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails won a small but significant victory April 15 when the Israeli Prison Service agreed to several key demands voiced by 400 prisoners who had been on an open-ended hunger strike. The hunger strikers’ apparent victory came just two days before Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, an observation held annually on April 17 to draw attention to the plight of the thousands of political prisoners held—many for very long terms and many without any fixed term at all—in Israel’s broad network of military prisons.
Founder and head of Israeli Physicians for Human Rights Ruchama Marton delivers a speech calling for Israelis to endorse BDS in the plight for Palestinian human rights as she wins the prestigious Leibowitz award. “Palestinians were here and will continue to be here. They can and some indeed want to live in peace if only the occupier’s boot were lifted from their necks.”
It all started because of a bird. Ahmed Abu Artema, the unlikely leader of the largest popular Palestinian movement in decades, strode beside the separation fence that divides his home in the Gaza Strip from Israel on a January evening last year. At twilight he saw birds fly overhead, soaring past the fence “and no one stopped them.” Abu Artema talks with Allison Deger about life in Gaza and the enduring power of the Great March of Return: “Our demands were simple and honorable, we want to return, we want a dignified life”
Following Israel’s expulsion of the TIPH observer group from Hebron last month, a group of Palestinian activists from the city formed their own team of observers to fill in the gaps. Mondoweiss followed the team around one morning, and in the span of half an hour, the group, including our cameraman, were attacked and harassed by Israeli settlers, while one international activist who was filming the altercation was arrested by police.
Palestinians took to the streets in Hebron to commemorate when a US-born Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, killing 29 and wounding more than 100. The protests this year were held at a time of heightened tensions in the city following the Israeli government’s expulsion of international human rights observers from the city.
Palestinian activists in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron have established their own local observer group in the wake of Israel’s expulsion of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) from the city.
The “Humboldt 3” are three BDS activists who face a criminal trial in Berlin next month for disrupting a pro-Israel event by an Israeli lawmaker at a university in 2017. Israel has silenced Germany on Palestinian rights using Holocaust guilt, but in Copenhagen the three activists received an award for their courage in exposing apartheid.