Now they tell us! A year after the U.S. lobbied the UN on behalf of Israel to get it delisted from an annex of countries violating children’s rights, NPR reports it, deep in a story about Saudi Arabia lobbying the U.N. to get a similar exception.

In an Al Jazeera interview, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy trashes PM Netanyahu for misusing the Holocaust to oppose the Iran deal and not having political dialogue with Hamas and says his days are numbered. Why aren’t American leaders and media reflecting these views?

Andrew Cuomo’s stand against BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) Sunday was an intentional political move by Democratic Party leadership, as Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street and Rep. Steve Israel both call on the party to oppose BDS in the party platform. The Sanders base is surely pro-BDS; but will they take a stand in Philadelphia over this issue?

Gov. Cuomo’s order opposing BDS shows that the powerful are willing to sell out democracy. So maybe BDS does stand for something else: Be Damn Sure, that if this current of anti-democratic acts is not countered, it will continue.

“Heartbroken and furious, I would never return there again,” Ayelet Waldman said of Israel after visiting separate-and-unequal Hebron with Breaking the Silence in 2014. She and her husband Michael Chabon are working on a collection about the occupation that has gotten a lot of attention in the Israeli press and is sure to shock American Jews.

Sebastian Junger says that in Israel, “no one says, thank you for service, because it’s like saying thank you for paying your taxes. I mean everybody does it.” But one fifth of the population does not do it, for ethnic-religious reasons that Americans would find objectionable.

Over the past 48 hours, we’ve been inundated by the news that Hillary Clinton would give a “major” foreign policy speech in California where, according to the latest polls, the Democratic primary race is running neck-and-neck. The truth is, despite a strong and well-carried-out performance, you could only look at her speech in two ways: It was an exemplary exercise of circumlocution, delivering vague and not-so-major remarks; or it was a major speech because of the things downplayed. Palestine was nonexistent in the address, but Israel’s place in the speech was pretty narrow, in a possible acknowledgement that the Israel brand isn’t one anyone wants to be associated with these days.

At Huffpo, Jennifer Sabin says the BDS movement is about “the right of Palestinians to control all of Israel”. Thus she equates a battle for equal rights with anti-Semitism, and manifests a bigoted denial of the Palestinian experience of being forced off their own land for 70 years.

Wendy Sherman, Mel Levine, Howard Berman, and Chemi Shalev all say that Hillary Clinton will not or should not compromise with Bernie Sanders on support for Israel in the Democratic platform, lest it hurt her among Jewish voters in the general election.

The fact that Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, who died on May 26, was outspoken for Palestinian rights doesn’t come till the end of a long obit for the activist in the New York Times, once again demonstrating bias at the newspaper aimed at preserving Israel’s positive image.