The failure by the World Medical Association to act on Israeli torture despite a 12-year-long, evidence-based appeal by 725 doctors from 43 countries regarding accountability for doctors complicit with Israeli torture practices shows there is not even-handed regulation of doctors worldwide regarding complicity with torture. “Publications deemed critical of Israel often evoke vitriolic and ad hominem attacks upon writer and medical journal – and little engagement with the cited evidence.”
Norman Finkelstein responds to B’Tselem’s designation of Israel as an “apartheid regime” saying that the aspect of Israeli rule that most manifests its Jewish supremacist character is the worthlessness it attaches to Palestinian life. And this is the most effective label– insisting on characterizing Israel as a Jewish supremacist state.
It’s been 53 years since Israel won 1967 war, and David Harris of the AJC expresses the mythic views of that war he held at 18, when it happened: that Israel faced a second Holocaust and annihilation, and acted in self-defense. Historians have thoroughly revised these distortions.
Norman Finkelstein says that the International Criminal Court crossed a “Rubicon” when it announced a formal investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza and its ongoing settlement project, but that the ICC will likely use a technicality, that Palestine has no standing as a state, to throw out the case. The real battle will be in public opinion, and the case may help force the reckoning inside the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders is being painted as an antisemite by some pro-Israel idelogues because he has taken strong positions in support of Palestinian human rights. Progressive defenders of Palestinian rights need to mobilize to oppose the campaign against Sanders, even if they don’t support Sanders’s presidential ambitions.
The New York Times parrots claims by Benjamin Netanyahu and Mike Pompeo that Israel owns the Golan Heights because it was taken in a “defensive war” in 1967, ignoring the historical record. Israel launched the war, the Arab states did not want war. “We chose to attack them,” former premier Menachem Begin said.
Norman Finkelstein on Richard Goldstone’s repudiation of his own report on Israeli atrocities in Gaza.