Shocking images of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the restoration of Taliban government have become a “talking point of the Israeli right,” says Israeli journalist Neri Zilber, speaking on an Israel lobby event. Israel must never withdraw from Palestinian territories it has occupied for 54 years, the right says. “We can’t agree for such an arrangement with the West Bank… Withdrawal from the West Bank should never be countenanced, considered seriously.”

“You are very fat. And ugly,” an Israeli soldier says to a Palestinian woman as he raids her home in occupied Palestine May 13. While the same day another Israeli soldier shouts homophobic abuse at a household and threatens to rape a woman. Two new videos from the human rights group B’Tselem document its charge that Israel maintains an “apartheid regime”. While settlers hurl anti-Muslim racism as soldiers do nothing.

Palestinians in Jerusalem are reeling from a night of racist, anti-Arab violence that left over a hundred Palestinians wounded and dozens detained, following an ultra-right wing Israeli demonstration in the city during which Jewish mobs chanted “death to Arabs.”

The New York Times runs “hasbara” or Israeli propaganda about coexistence in Haifa, including humans with wild boars. But Alice Rothchild writes that boars are actually a tool of occupation: Jewish settlements outside Nablus frequently blocked access to the local villages, burned their farms and olive trees, and raised wild pigs that they released into Palestinian farms.

“The Palestinians have never had this kind of a card in their sleeve, that actually might restrain Israel.” Human rights attorney Michael Sfard says that there is “absolutely no way” for the ICC to evade an investigation of Israeli settlements as a war crime.

The Jewish National Fund has been “redeeming” Palestinian land by giving it to Jews for 100 years, but liberal Zionists are alarmed by a new plan to buy up Palestinian land in the West Bank to bolster illegal Jewish settlements.

Liberal Zionists say there are 2 regimes in Israel and West Bank, and apartheid in the West Bank doesn’t undermine democracy in Israel. It’s a fiction, Nathan Thrall shows in London Review of Books. Israel’s discriminations against Palestinians demonstrate there has been an apartheid policy in Israeli government since 1948.

The extended family of Asmaa Tayeh, operations manager for We Are Not Numbers, is increasingly typical of residents there. Twenty-five members of the clan have tested positive for the virus, 15 have fallen ill and three have died.

Rights groups have accused Israel of discriminating against its Palestinian communities by failing to provide accurate information regarding COVID-19 and the vaccine in Arabic.

Israeli plans to annex the West Bank are “dead,” says reporter Barak Ravid. That’s a demonstration of the power of Israel lobby organizations in the U.S. to stop the Israeli government. They could do the same thing on unending settlements, if they would just take a stand.