SNCC veteran Dorothy Zellner speaks to Phil Weiss about the threat of fascism in the U.S., organizing for Palestine within Jewish communities, and the backlash Jews can face in their own families for criticizing Israel.

An Israeli official admits that designating six Palestinian NGOs as “terrorist groups” has hurt the country’s standing in the United States, particularly within the Democratic party as multiple lawmakers have condemned the move. So it seems like Israel is now scrambling to do some more damage control.

The liberal Zionist organization J Street is adamantly opposed to BDS, the nonviolent boycott campaign targeting Israel, and proudly declares that it is “Pro-Israel.” But one of its student leaders evidently disagrees with the organization. Eliana Blumberg supports BDS and says that the effort to say that being “pro-Israel means being pro-democracy, not pro-apartheid” is “futile.”

Shaul Magid’s biography of Meir Kahane is timely because Kahane is an icon for the messianic Jewish leaders who are pushing the country further right. The book is Magid’s “attempt to understand his worldview.” But Kahane’s worldview is easy to understand: Jews must forever rule the Promised Land. And that extremist religious Zionism now sets the agenda for the country.

Liz Rose wrestles with the Zionism she found so enthralling as a girl. “I didn’t care about my Russia Ukraine history. From a very early age–and with enormous help from the Zionist lobby’s efforts to create a brilliant branding campaign–I fantasized about and idealized Israel far more than I ever wondered about the true place my family was from. Instead of learning about Russia Ukraine, I dreamt of working in a field picking tomatoes on a kibbutz in Israel, singing songs while tilling the land, and putting down new roots with other young Jews who, like me, had cut the branches from their families in the U.S. (and Europe) and left their old lives behind.”

Israeli leaders are going crazy over the display of Palestinian flags– of course, because Israel is a Jewish state not a democracy. And an intellectual leader of the Israel lobby, Michael Koplow, admits the failure of Zionism in the reaction. “If waving a flag threatens Israel’s existence, then not only is Israel in far bigger trouble than anyone understands, but Zionism itself has failed.”

Zionism not only seeks to dismember Palestinian life and connectedness, but also the threads of signification that nurture steadfastness and resistance.

“The army and the settlement enterprise are one and the same” — a general in Israel’s occupying army says the quiet part about Zionism out loud. It has always been a messianic religious movement to establish Jewish supremacy in as much land as it can conquer. Gen. Roy Zweig was later reprimanded for speaking out, on Jerusalem Day.

The Mapping Project shows connections between oppressive institutions where we live – including NGOs, weapons companies, computer/logistics companies, universities, biomedical research institutions, and others. The intersections between agents of oppression offer possibilities for connecting our struggles. They study us and are networked; we need to study them and form our own networks of resistance.

An interview with the activists behind the Mapping Project, a project created to “investigate local links between entities responsible for the colonization of Palestine, for colonialism and dispossession here where we live, and for the economy of imperialism and war.”