A new cafe in Gaza is a meeting place with a message — “we have a home and we will return to it.” 

If the U.N. appears to single Israel out, it is because the country owes its existence to that body and has repeatedly defied principles it agreed to when it gained membership at the U.N. “The failure to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace remains for the UN a deep internal wound as old as the organization itself, (…) a painful and festering sore consequently felt in almost every intergovernmental organ and Secretariat body,” Kofi Annan said.

Israeli author Einat Wilf tells the Democratic Party how to give the bad news to Palestinians. “I had to wrestle with the fact that I’m not a nice person. And I accepted it,” she says. So Americans must give “not pleasant” messages to Palestinians, that they need to accept that Zionism is a legitimate “indigenous” movement for Jewish liberation in the Middle East.

This week, Yitzhak Rabin will be remembered in Israel as a peacemaker on the anniversary of his assassination. One fact that will be ignored however is that Rabin was one of the key perpetrators of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policy.

An attack on a tour of the depopulated Palestinian village of Lifta is a sobering reminder of the necessity of marking the Nakba.

The secret is out. Yair Lapid’s call for a Jewish majority in Israel shows that Israel’s raison d’etre is Jewish supremacy. Jews in Israel have spent immense effort and time over the last 70 years, trying to find another meaning for a “Jewish state”, and failed. A Jewish state is one in which the Jew is master and everyone else should be thankful for what rights he deigns to grant them.

Adalah Justice Project’s Sumaya Awad talks with Jehad Abusalim about Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, and the US movement for Palestine in the wake of the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza. “It is crucial to understand Gaza and its experience in the context of the Nakba and its unfolding and continuation since 1948. This has to be the starting point if people want to be serious and invested in understanding the current situation in Gaza,” Abusalim explains.

Jane Hirschmann’s parents fled Germany after Hitler came to power. Later Germany gave her father reparations for a lost business and granted Hirschmann and her children and grandchildren citizenship. “I wonder why the 750,000 Palestinians forced from their homes and land in 1948 when Israel was founded are not entitled to the same treatment my family received after WWII ended. But the war on Palestinians was never over. Instead, Israel continues to this day its policy of ethnic cleansing, as evidenced by the current expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah and other parts of East Jerusalem,” she writes.

Farrah Akbik learned the story of Palestine from a friend’s family who lived it firsthand when they were forced out of Safed in 1948, and still had the key to their house hanging on the wall of their small apartment in Damascus. “There is an ongoing system of Apartheid designed specifically to push more and more Palestinians out of their rightful homes and ancestral lands, and to populate them with settlers. More injustice, more people on the roads of exodus carrying yet more keys. The apathy I read, see and hear around me is baffling, but maybe if they had sat in that kitchen with Abu Khaldoon and heard him retell his journey I would like to think that even the most indifferent of hearts would have been stirred.”

The killing and destruction will end only when the root of the problem is addressed: a colonialist regime that continually dispossesses the Palestinians.