Tag

Top Headlines

Browsing
Activists call for boycotting Israel. (Photo via BDSMovement.net)

Last week, both Missouri and Oklahoma’s state legislatures passed bills prohibiting the state from entering into contracts with businesses that boycott Israel. “Year after year, activists in these states successfully fought back against anti-boycott bills. This year, while legislative sessions were truncated due to COVID-19, and people sheltering in place were unable to fight back, lawmakers made the time to pass bills aiming to silence constitutionally protected speech in support of Palestinian rights,” Palestine Legal’s Meera Shah tells Mondoweiss.

May 15 marked the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba, or the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homelands in 1948. This year demonstrations were smaller due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, with Palestinians opting for smaller scale and online commemorations of the occasion.

A Palestinian worker disinfects streets of the Al-Shati' refugee camp as a preventive measure amid fears of the spread of COVID-19, in Gaza City on March 16, 2020. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA Images)

Hamza Abu Al-Tarabeesh’s fear of the coronavirus is based on his late grandfather’s death during a Tuberculosis epidemic in Gaza’s refugee camps during the mid-1960s. “I have no idea what the future holds for the refugee camps in Gaza,” Abu Al-Tarabeesh writes, “but I do know when it comes to infectious diseases and viruses, the past has been alarming.”

Maryland Senator Ben Cardin posing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem during a visit in March 2016. (Courtesy of U.S. Senate)

The Netanyahu-Gantz coalition government will be sworn in this week and Netanyahu has made it clear that he intends to move forward with annexation plans this summer. Almost every Democrat opposes the move, but virtually none of them want to even suggest doing anything about it.