American liberals in despair over the presidential election would do well to look at Israel, where setbacks at the ballot box brought left-wingers together and drove them to think bigger. By Matt Duss and Dahlia Scheindlin As the initial shock of the presidential election fades, American progressives are left struggling with disturbing implications beyond the mere fact of being on the losing side. We ponder the apparent declaration that America rejects its religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ community, the immigrants who have made this country great, its independent women, and even its equality-supporting men. What looked like a historic march toward…

The trials of two police officers in Israel-Palestine and the U.S. collapsed within hours of each other on Monday. Both cases prove how difficult it is to secure justice for Palestinian and African-American victims of state violence. On May 15, 2014, three Palestinian teenagers were shot by Israeli security forces with live ammunition as they attended a Nakba Day protest in the West Bank town of Beitunia. Nadim Nawara, 17, and Muhammed Abu al-Thahir, 16, were both killed. Fifteen-year-old Muhammed Azzeh survived, despite having been shot in the lung. Just under a year later, over 6,000 miles away, a police officer…

Distracted by the 'fire intifada' that wasn't and the progress of the 'muezzin law,' the Israeli Left and several Palestinian Knesset members failed to call out the other injustices of the last few weeks.  It’s easy to condemn the declarations that the recent wave of fires across Israel brought from Israel’s igniter — sorry, inciter-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu, its lacking-in-culture minister and its minister of uneducation, who all claimed that a “fire intifada” was afoot. And the Palestinians and the Israeli Left did indeed condemn them. We all condemned them. But what comes next? [tmwinpost] To tell the truth, I avoided the local…

Citing potential damage to Israel's foreign relations, the Supreme Court rejects a petition calling to reveal details of the government's arms exports to the Serbian army during the Bosnian genocide. By John Brown* (Translated by Tal Haran) Israel’s Supreme Court last month rejected a petition to reveal details of Israeli defense exports to the former Yugoslavia during the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s. The court ruled that exposing Israeli involvement in genocide would damage the country’s foreign relations to such an extent that it would outweigh the public interest in knowing that information, and the possible prosecution of those involved.…

Darfuri asylum seeker Babikir Adham-Uvdo was beaten to death by two teenagers after he was allegedly seen speaking to a group of young women. Why aren't more Israelis talking about it? By John Brown* Emmett Till was an African-American teenager from Mississippi who was lynched on August 14, 1955 during a visit to his relatives. His murderers mutilated him and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River after he reportedly flirted with a 21-year-old white woman by the name of Carolyn Bryant. [tmwinpost] After they were were acquitted, Till's killers admitted to the crime in an interview, claiming that they did not believe…

The Israeli army's new tourism campaign wants you to visit Palestine — just don't call it that. The Israeli military launched a truly bizarre rendition of a Visit Palestine tourism campaign over the weekend. Except the army couldn’t bring itself to say Palestine, the West Bank, or even mention that Palestinians live there. The video was published on the Facebook page of the IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military government that oversees the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The video mentions sites like Wadi Qelt, the Mar Saba Monastery and Nabi Musa, sites in the…

As the Democratic party regroups ahead of the next election cycle, it would be wise for its leadership to examine areas where the Clinton campaign diverged from the party’s base. Israel-Palestine is one of those issues. The number of Americans who support imposing sanctions on Israel over its defiant settlement policies has shot up to 46 percent, the same percentage of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election. [tmwinpost] That number has shot up nearly 10 percentage points over the past year, according to a national poll published by the Brookings Institute on Friday, on the sidelines…

The U.S. Senate unanimously passes a bill that would force universities to include 'holding Israel to a double standard' as a form of anti-Semitism. By James J. Zogby Without debate or an actual vote, the U.S. Senate stealthily passed a disturbing and dangerous piece of legislation that would require the Department of Education (DOE) to apply the State Department's definition of anti-Semitism in evaluating complaints of discrimination on U.S. campuses. [tmwinpost] The State Department definition of and guidelines on anti-Semitism were designed to help U.S. officials monitor anti-Semitism abroad. They were not intended to be applied to police speech on…

The police has yet to declare a single wildfire an act of terrorism, the commissioner says arson is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and many cases of suspected terrorism turned out to be nothing more than negligence. This, of course, does not bother Israel's leaders or media. Now that the rain has started pouring, bringing an end to the wildfire season, it is imperative that we stop and look back at just what happened last week — before everything is forgotten. Or worse: before everything that happened is remembered as a story of terrorist attacks by Arab citizens against Jews. Only a week ago did…

At the Fatah Congress this week, Abbas’s followers seem to have affirmed a choice Oslo’s signatories made more than two decades ago: that livelihoods matter more than liberation. Palestinians deserve an alternative to this status quo. In Hisham Sharabi’s 1988 book, Neopatriarchy, the late Palestinian intellectual posits “a theory of distorted change in the Arab world,” one in which “the paternal will is the absolute will.” When it comes to politics, this paternalism is easy to miss, Sharabi argued, because it uses “external trappings,” like elections, to give the illusion of consensus—all while relying on familiar patterns of “ritual and…