The United Church of Christ vote in favor of divestment and boycott has prompted an incredibly fair report from the NYT, saying the BDS movement is growing and is supported by a “growing number” of American Jews.
Netanyahu’s latest cartoon aimed at stopping the Iran deal equates ISIS with the “Islamic State of Iran” and says the west is allowing it to build nukes aimed at the U.S. Its actual name is the Islamic Republic.
On a visit to East Jerusalem, the rule of occupation and apartheid is concrete and tangible. Services are denied to Palestinians that Jewish settlers living among them get. When you build walls, you make a labyrinth of the world, a graffiti warns
Today, in a vote of 508 in favor and 124 against, the plenary of the 30th United Church of Christ General Synod passed a resolution calling for boycotts and divestment from companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. “As disciples of Jesus, we hear and seek to heed his call to be peacemakers, responding to violence with nonviolence and extending love to all,” said Rev. John Deckenback, Conference Minister of the Central Atlantic Conference of the UCC, which submitted the resolution to the synod. “It is in that spirit of love for both Israelis and Palestinians, and a desire to support Palestinians in their nonviolent struggle for freedom, that the United Church of Christ has passed this resolution.”
Early Monday three Israeli naval ships seized a vessel bound for Gaza carrying activists and humanitarian aid while still in international waters, said activists. The Freedom Flotilla III, headed by the Swedish ship the Marianne of Gothenburg, was attempting to break the eight-year siege on the Gaza Strip. The boat and its 18 passengers were being towed to Ashdod, where it was expected that the activists would be deported.
Frightened by the progress of the boycott movement, BDS, four hardline Israel supporters have called for changes in Israeli policy, freezing outlying settlement activity to improve Israel’s image. They are Yair Lapid, Ari Shavit, Abe Foxman, and Michael Oren
On Monday, Ramallah-based visual artist Khaled Jarrar painted a portion of Israel’s separation wall as a rainbow flag following the US Supreme Court decision in support of marriage equality. Jarrar said in a statement: “I went and painted the colors of the rainbow (on the wall) as these colors were circulated all over the world. These colors are ultimately an expression of freedom.”
Mondoweiss co-editor Adam Horowitz shares his personal story of becoming engaged in the Palestine solidarity movement as part of our “Be The Mondoweiss Megaphone” campaign. Please help us raise $50,000 to bring Mondoweiss to more thinking people, opinion leaders, policy-makers, and policy un-makers too!
The recently released United Nations report on the 2014 war in Gaza meticulously documents last summer’s horror. The reports of Israeli executions of Palestinians, Israel’s aerial assaults on Palestinians in their homes in Gaza and other aspects of the assault have attracted the most attention, but the UN report also highlights what it calls “widespread human rights violations” by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The document is a reminder that the uptick in tensions and violence last summer was not limited to Gaza. In fact, the human rights abuses the report looks at still occur near-daily in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Every Monday, Palestinians in Nuseirat refugee camp rummage through piles of secondhand Israeli junk in the cheapest market in the Gaza Strip. Dan Cohen finds several t-shirts that include military insignia for the army that slaughtered so many in Gaza.
Ma‘an reports: Israeli forces shot and injured a 14-year-old Mohammad Abdul Ilah with live ammunition on Saturday when they opened fire on a march in the West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum near Qalqiliya.
Michael Oren’s attack on American Jews has backfired. His book is getting trashed by reviewers, all of whom cite his sneering view of US Jews as self-hating because they don’t love Israel enough. His former college roommate David Rothkopf says his views are “profoundly offensive” and “twist reality.”
The new UN report on the Gaza war of last summer accepts Israel’s rationale for the destruction of 70 mosques in Gaza, a display of rank anti-Muslim bigotry, Norman Finkelstein says, in a report that strains to be “fair” to both sides and thereby balances grossly different death tolls
The psychotherapist Avigail Abarbanel was born in Israel but says that trauma lies at the heart of Israeli institutions and makes the country impossible to reason with. In conversation with Hazel Kahan
“You know which cow produces more milk per cow than any other cow? You think it’s a Dutch cow or French cow? No, it’s a Jewish cow. It’s a computerized cow. Every moo is computerized” — Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu outdoes the cherry tomato and drip irrigation
West Bank demonstrations were suppressed by Israel on Friday, and in Jerusalem a settler rammed a Palestinian woman with his car, injuring her. He got a ticket and was freed.
“Your map of Israel is enclosed,” the New Israel Fund writes in a fundraising letter to American Jews. This gut-Zionist appeal by a progressive group shows the limits of action by liberal Zionist groups to address the roots of the conflict.
The repudiation of the Confederate flag by Republican politicians and the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality shows that change takes place in “thunderbolts,” as President Obama said today. Those thunderbolts will come sooner than anyone thinks for Palestinians.
Jewish identity continues to be threatened with a paranoid fear of annihilation. Victimhood and guilt is acted out of a perception that Palestinians wish to destroy Jews. The poet and author Lillian Rosengarten, writing at Mondoweiss
In op-eds timed to Episcopal and United Church of Christ conventions, church leaders say BDS is not anti-Semitic and is required as a moral response to new Israeli government’s expansionist policies
Israel doesn’t really have to change its policies re Palestinians to fight BDS, Michael Oren says, but it has to spend more money on fighting the campaign or its military will be grounded
Israel’s Deputy Interior Minister Yaron Mazuz called on Palestinian lawmakers to return Israeli identity cards. “We are doing you people a favor by even allowing you to be seated here – terrorists won’t be allowed to sit here.”
Foreign direct investment in Israel dropped by 50% in 2014 according to a 2015 World Investment Report issued yesterday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. One of the authors of the report, Dr. Ronny Manos from the Open University of Israel, speculates the declining investment is fallout from the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza last summer and “international boycotts” against Israel for “alleged violations of international law.”
Jonathan Rosen, novelist and editorial director of a leading line of Jewish books, describes Edward Said’s Orientalism, an iconic book for Arab-Americans, as a “monster” in academic and public life. Zionism is making American Jewish organizations very conservative indeed.
Promoting a letter from 5 former Obama advisers questioning the Iran deal, the NYT leaves the fact that it originated at the thinktank WINEP till the 26th paragraph and never says that the Israel lobby AIPAC started WINEP.