At Huffpo, Steve Koppman, author of a book of Jewish folklore, says that Jewish principles would prompt Jews to support boycott of Israel because it is a tyranny of Jewish Israelis over disfranchised millions of Palestinians. Why isn’t his argument in the New York Times, a wasteland of lifestyle news?
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In a speech at St. Louis’s Central Reform Synagogue on August 6, social activist Arielle Klagsbrun explained why she broke “my code of silence” on Israel due to its violence against Palestinian friends, and then said many Jews are having a “watershed moment” with Gaza and the Jewish community must not push them away.
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The eyes of the world were in Gaza, but meantime Israel was also clamping down the occupation in the West Bank. It killed 32 Palestinians over the last two months and announced 1472 new settlements
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The cease-fire that ended seven weeks of hell in Gaza is only two days old. But the countdown to the next round began as soon as the ink dried on the agreement between Israel and the Palestinian armed factions. The deep-rooted problems bedeviling the Palestinian people and Israel have not gone away. The only question is when that next spasm of violence breaks out.
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Peter Beinart calls on young American liberal Zionists to protest the occupation in the West Bank ala the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. But how many young liberal Zionists care enough about the Jewish state to go so far to be arrested? And what happens when they march with Palestinians who don’t believe in Zionism?
On Tuesday August 26, 2014, more than 50 demonstrators protested outside the Newark, New Jersey, offices of U.S. Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker demanding that the legislators stop providing a blank check for Israel’s crimes. Thirteen demonstrators were arrested inside the building as they read out the names of some of the nearly 500 Palestinian children killed in Gaza.
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Thousands took to the streets of Gaza to celebrate what they described as the resistance victory over Israel during the recent conflict. A spokesman for the Qassam Brigade said that violence was a necessary counterpart to negotiations with Israeli occupiers.
Mohammed Abulriban describes living in Gaza during the recent fighting: “Words are not enough to express what goes here in Gaza. Nothing is more expensive than losing your family, your friends, your neighbors or anyone you used to be with. My friend’s house and my father’s farm have been destroyed with no reason. Our neighbours have been killed for nothing. The mosque I used to pray in has been destroyed.”
The Gaza onslaught represents the end of the Israeli rationale for violence. 110 years of ethnic cleansing and assassinations and Palestinian resistance will not disappear. Israel must come to terms with its indigenous population, or it will itself disappear, Jeff Halper writes at Mondo
“America has a very special relationship with Israel. Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world” — Senator Elizabeth Warren mouths Israel’s talking points at a town hall where Mass residents object to funding Israel’s massacre.
Bruce Shipman, a Yale chaplain, says that anti-Semitism is fed by Israel’s “carnage” against Gaza and American Jews ought to pressure Netanyahu to stop such behavior. There has been a backlash against him for the comments, but they demonstrate that US non-Jews are taking a more active role in the discourse since the Gaza atrocities.
Historian Natalie Zemon Davis writes University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise about the case of Steven Salaita.
For a month from July 8th – August 8th, The New York Times inserted a grossly misleading interactive into each of their online stories that included a comparison between “targets in Gaza struck by Israel” and “rockets launched at Israel from Gaza.” The resulting figures suggested near parity in attacks by both sides.
Talal Alhelo describes the destruction of his and his brothers’ houses in Sheja’iyeh, and the killing of his brother Gehad’s family. His niece was caught beneath the rubble, crying for help. Now her eyes are the only ones Talal can see. Ishraq Othman tells the haunting story at Mondo.
Connie Bruck says AIPAC’s power is fading, in the New Yorker, but her piece misleads on two fronts: conflating “the Israel lobby” entirely with AIPAC and making J Street a white knight; and saying that the movement inside American Jewish life that is critical of Israel is still devoted to the state, thereby writing off a burgeoning group of non- and anti-Zionists
B’nai B’rith magazine celebrates wines from Psagot without telling readers that it is an illegal settlement in the West Bank. The American Jewish leadership embraces the settlement project; it defeated the two state solution.
The Israeli press acted as Iron Dome to protect Israeli readers from the truth of the Gaza operation. The gravest images of Palestinian suffering will not be shown in the most popular newspapers in Israel. The stories of loss and devastation, of individuals and families, will not be told. The press most resembles American media in the initial period following 9/11, where a wave of nationalism swept coverage and silenced dissenting voices.
Palestinians continued to demonstrate in East Jerusalem in solidarity with Gaza, and an Israeli policy of widespread detention, 770 Palestinians so far, has brought charges of collective punishment
Israel and the Palestinian armed groups waging war in Gaza for the past seven weeks have inked a cease-fire deal that promises an end to the fighting. The reported terms of the deal include an easing of the blockade of Gaza and the halting of attacks from both sides–a similar agreement reached in 2012 during the last round of fighting. Representatives of Palestinian parties are celebrating the deal as a victory, and people in Gaza have also taken to the streets in celebration. But in Israel, the reaction to the cease-fire was much more dour.
Non-Jewish Americans have been loath to criticize Israel because you don’t comment on someone else’s family and you can be accused of anti-Semitism. Gaza has changed that. Phil Weiss reports from a lakeside cabin on non-Jewish attitudes.