Our February pick for the Mondoweiss book club is Zaina Arafat’s “You Exist Too Much,” an outstanding debut novel featuring a bisexual Palestinian-American protagonist who is struggling with an eating disorder, a shifting relationship with her mother, and busy with unattainable infatuations. We’re delighted to announce at the end of the month we are going to host a live event with the author.

Announcing construction on a key Jerusalem settlement 5 hours before inauguration, utterly foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state, Netanyahu sought an “altercation” with Joe Biden, says Jerusalem watcher Daniel Seidemann. And who won? Biden has said nothing.

Israel lobby group AIPAC and the National Security Council come down on NBC for raising questions about a Biden aide who donated $559,000 to AIPAC — calling the story an antisemitic allegation of dual loyalty — and NBC retracts the story! A shocking case of influence in plain sight.

Liberal Zionist groups have all but ignored B’Tselem’s bombshell report stating that Israel is an apartheid regime. And no wonder, the report impugns the progressive credentials of any organization that calls itself pro-Israel, and apartheid demands use of a tool liberal Zionists have rejected as allegedly antisemitic, BDS.

President Biden’s commitment to re-entering the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA—is already facing backlash from a motley crew of warhawks both domestic and foreign. Right now, opponents of re-entering the deal are centering their vitriol on one of the nation’s foremost experts on both the Middle East and diplomacy: Robert Malley, who Biden might tap to be the next Iran envoy.

On January 15th Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that presidential and parliamentary elections would be held this spring and summer, 15 years after he was first elected for what was supposed to be a four-year term. Yumna Patel talks to Palestinians about their thoughts on the vote and many share the same concern — will they be a true chance to make their voices heard, or is it just another facade of democracy on part of the PA?

Andrew Marr of the BBC grilled Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein about why Israel is not extending its vaccination program to the Palestinian people in territories it occupies, and Edelstein said Israel has no more obligation to them than the Palestinian minister of health has to “take care of dolphins in the Mediterranean.” Yes, you heard that right.

In an open letter to Antony Blinken, Mona AlMsaddar tells the incoming U.S. secretary of state that his family’s story of surviving World War II resonates with her own family’s history of the Nakba. She writes, “our Nakba was not limited to 1948. It continues each day that we are forced to live under these conditions. So, please, Mr. Blinken, when you deliberate on policy related to Israel and Palestinians in the coming months, remember my family.”

NY mayor candidate Andrew Yang’s statement that BDS is “rooted in antisemitic thought and history,” going back to Nazi boycotts of Jewish businesses, was a highly intentional statement aimed at capturing the NY Jewish establishment, which has rewarded anti-BDS politicians.

On Wednesday, Israel issued tenders for more than 2,500 new settlement housing units in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem a mere hours before US President Joe Biden was sworn into office. The Israeli government has now approved and promoted thousands of new settlement housing units in the first few weeks of 2021, while also continuing to deny Palestinians the right to build on their land in Area C — the more than 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control.