The Netanyahu government has advanced plans for 4,948 new settlement units in the West Bank, signalling an end to the pretense that Israel halted its annexation plans in exchange for normalization with Arab countries. Analysts suggest the slate of approvals are part of a larger effort to take advantage of US support while Donald Trump is still in power.
An Israeli soldier’s knee to the neck of protester Khairy Hanoun, 65, as he tried to stop Israel from seizing Palestinian lands in West Bank Tuesday, surrounded by photographers, is being compared to the choking of George Floyd in int’l media.
Rightwing Israeli Shmuel Rosner once again justifies slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the New York Times, in a column praising Trump and calling Biden a Zionist who “understands the need to use force.”
Palestinians must recognize the “right and reality of Jewish state,” and US left is “equally wrong” to Trump in not criticizing Palestinians for their failure to do so, says Biden aide Tony Blinken, signaling that Biden will be far more supportive of Israel than Obama was.
Mike Flynn lied to the FBI about trying to undermine then-President Obama’s decision to rebuke Israeli settlements at the UN. The press typically leaves out this angle in covering the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case 3 years later. Another case of Russian interference!
The American Jewish Committee decided that it must support Israel over President Bush in 1991 over settlements, even though many of its officials privately supported Bush, because the AJC had a “primary responsibility” to back the “collective will” of the Jewish people, which Israel represents, Steve Bayme, an AJC official says in a Zoom webinar.
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.
The New York Times gives Paul Wolfowitz a platform to criticize Trump on the withdrawal from Syria, and the fight against ISIS, without saying a word about the roots of ISIS in the destruction that his project of invading Iraq wrought throughout the region. Wolfowitz should be on trial for major war crimes, Helena Cobban writes, not featured in the New York Times.
In March 2016 the United Nations Human Rights Council mandated a database of companies profiting from Israel’s settlements. Originally due in 2017, its publication remains in limbo as the release was delayed several times. However, a similar database on Myanmar was ordered in September 2018 and completed a year later.
Canada’s attorney general has announced he was appealing a recent federal court ruling that banned labeling wines produced in West Banks settlements as products of Israel.