In the long-term, negotiations between Lebanon and Israel over maritime borders will be detrimental to the interests of Lebanon and its people. Israel always negotiates in bad faith.

Israel has gone from attacking former US President Jimmy Carter for using the “A” word in the title of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to having to deal with an Israeli organization making the legal case that the entire state may be an Apartheid state.

Functioning at the UN as Israel’s defense lawyer for its serial violations of international law has once again cost Canada the coveted Security Council seat. And rightly so, says Fr. Robert Assaly.

The Trudeau government’s record of voting against 50 UN resolutions affirming Palestinian rights undercut its effort to get on to the UN Security Council, and the blowback may lessen the influence of the Israel lobby in Canada. Because the truth is that the Canadian public doesn’t want the government pursuing anti-Palestinian positions.

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have fostered settler violence against Palestinians, the U.N. reports, according to the Jerusalem Post. Between March 17 and 30, “at least 16 attacks by Israeli settlers resulted in five Palestinian injuries and extensive property damage. This represents a 78% increase compared to the bi-weekly average of incidents since the start of 2020.”

We wouldn’t have had the leveling ideals provided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights legal framework without the context of the Holocaust. Now that vision of the equality of human beings in the eyes of the law is broken by Israel’s contempt for Palestinians.

Roger Waters on the importance of international solidarity with Palestinians: “The aim … is to focus world attention on the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza in the hope that the scales will fall from the eyes of all, ordinary, decent people round the world, that they may see the enormity of the crimes that have been committed, and demand that their governments bring all possible pressure to bear on Israel to lift the siege.”

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. 

Ramzy Baroud writes the call by Mahmoud Abbas for elections is a ploy. “There will be no true, democratic elections under Abbas’ leadership. The real question is why did he make the call in the first place?”

After Marc Lamont Hill gave a speech at the U.N. last November calling for equal rights in Palestine, his employer CNN called the next day and fired him. “They said, ‘Your speech was not in line with our values,'” he recalls to Palestinian journalist Janna Jihad. “I said, which part of the speech? They said, The speech.” Hill was shocked. “I’m prone to saying crazy shit. I just didn’t do it that day!”