“You should never describe BDS as a movement,” Alan Dershowitz said in Scarsdale May 10. But in a 2014 screed against BDS, Dersh repeatedly refers to the “BDS movement.” I guess he hadn’t gotten the memo he hadn’t yet written.

Speaking at the Jerusalem Post conference, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said the Jewish Diaspora serves as a global intelligence asset to Israel: “the worldwide relationships because of the Jewish Diaspora gives Israel some advantages that virtually no other country or institution anywhere else in the world has.”

Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed Saba’aneh, now on a book tour in the US, spent five months in an Israeli prison, so he knows why 1600 prisoners are staging a hunger strike, and how much their families are suffering. Saba’aneh threw himself into documenting prison conditions during his solitary confinement.

Roger Waters on BDS: “Palestinians… should have equal rights. And that is my only beef. Just as all the people living in the US should have equal rights, all of them, regardless of their color, creed, race or religion– that is what I want for the Palestinians. Nothing more, nothing less. I’m not trying to destroy Israel.”

The PEN World Voices festival is taking place in New York this week, without the sponsorship of the Israeli government, for once; and Patti Smith honored Rachel Corrie last night there.

We must admit we are living in the golden age of Jewish anti-Zionism. A young Maine director, Eric Axelman, is doing a film about the American Jewish responsibility for the occupation. US Jews have the “magic stick” to change Israel, a Palestinian tells him.

There is no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of Israel than Russia. But if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.

When Israeli soldiers carried her novel in one hand and a gun in the other into Gaza in 2014, trying to kill “bad guys,” that was all that a writer could ask for her work, Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan says in New York, in a tour sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Marking Marwan Barghouti as a ‘terrorist’ is very important for Israel and the New York Times, too. The Times did not impose such standards when it was celebrating Nelson Mandela.

Amith Gupta writes a double standard was at play when the New York Times decided to amend an op-ed written by imprisoned Palestinian Marwan Barghouti by adding in his conviction when the crimes and biases of other contributors are defended or ignored, “While the New York Times decided to poison the well for Marwan Barghouti, it has taken the opposite position in disclosing the backgrounds of many of its pro-Israel commentators. In 2014, the New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan responded to concerns about the Times’ failure to disclose that one of its contract writers, Isabel Kershner, was married to pro-Israel lobbyist Hirsh Goodman when the former wrote extensive puff pieces sanitizing Israel. Omitted from the response was the additional fact that Kershner’s son was actively serving in the Israeli army during its 2014 Gaza massacre. But according to the public editor, such background details about a writer of the Times’ primary coverage–rather than its opinion pieces–was ‘unnecessary.'”